Robert Sapolsky is "your basic confused human when it comes to violence." He's for gun control but loves shooting people in laser tag. He doesn't believe in the death penalty but has specific fantasies about how he would kill Hitler. He's also a neuroscientist who studies stress and its effects in primates. So, naturally, he wanted to figure...

  Super Cells is the new TED Book by Nina Tandon and Mitchell Joachim, who take us on an eye-popping tour of the tantalizing array of inventions already being created with nature’s elemental building block, the cell. They argue that we’re entering a new technological revolution, one in which we can create smarter technologies by making ce...

Congratulations to TEDWomen 2013 speaker Dr. Paula Johnson who, earlier this month, was sworn in as the 14th president of Wellesley College. She is the first African-American president of the institution. Dr. Johnson is a pioneer in looking at health from a woman's perspective. Before taking the helm at Wellesley, she was the chief of the...

In today's TED Talk, biologist Mohamed Hijri directs our attention to an incredible biotechnology -- not one he invented, but one that’s been around for 450 million years. They are: mycorrhiza, microscopic mushrooms that grow in a symbiotic relationship with the roots of plants. These mushrooms are incredible at helping plants find phosphoro...

There’s wild sex. And then there’s sex in the wild — a topic that biologist and animal sex expert Carin Bondar has been talking about for years, spawning not only a book, The Nature of Human Nature, but also a popular web series, “Wild Sex,” all about the evolution of sexual behavior. In her funny and bold talk from TEDGlobal 2013, Bondar...

On stage at TEDGlobal 2011, Geoffrey West talked about the universal mathematics that govern cities and corporations. Knowing only the population of a city, he can predict the number of patents, the crime rate, the average walking speed and many other features of a city. Before the conference, TED's Ben Lillie reached him in his office at...

Ever want to play with genes? Synthetic biologist Oliver Medvedik thinks anyone should be able to access a biology lab and tinker with the stuff of life. That's why he co-founded Genspace, the world's first fully equipped community biolab, where citizen scientists of all stripes meet to explore, experiment and learn about genetic engineering. ...

Architecture and microbiology may seem like an odd couple, but TED Senior Fellow Jessica Green would beg to differ. In today’s talk, she reveals what’s teeming all over the surfaces around us, and how it can help us build smarter, healthier buildings. As the founding director of the Biology in the Built Environment Center at the University of...

Art so often seeks to capture the beauty of the natural world -- from cave drawings of animals, to paintings of landscapes, to sculptures of the human form in marble, bronze or wood. But in this playlist, find artists and designers who take this to the next level, making art based on the laws of nature and the invisible workings of biology i...

(TED is on its annual two-week vacation. During the break, we’re posting playlists from the TEDTalks archive. We’ll be back with new talks on August 29th.) We live amongst it. We live away from it. We live with it. We live in spite of it. We love it. We hate it. Regardless of how we feel about it, we can all learn a great deal from it. Nature...

Biologist Carin Bondar (TED Talk: The birds and the bees are just the beginning) studies how animals get down and dirty. The details are often bizarre but fascinating. "We hit topics hard, and not just for the quirk factor, but because there is a lot of cool science behind so many strange mating rituals," she says of stories she tells with humor...

In this short talk from TEDxCooperUnion, bioengineer (and TED Fellow) Nina Tandon talks about her experiment in using TED Conversations as a teaching tool in a tissue engineering class -- inspiring students to ask bigger questions online, and engage with a broad community to create wide-ranging discussions about biology, ethics, perception an...

(TED is on its annual two-week vacation. During the break, we’re posting playlists from the TEDTalks archive. We’ll be back with new talks on August 29th.) “If you could only see the world the way I see it …” Four TEDTalks from non-neurotypical thinkers, people whose minds work in extraordinary and unusual ways. 1) Temple Grandin, diagnose...

It's fun watching the pre-TEDGlobal tweets roll in from our speakers ... Lee Cronin (@leecronin): Getting ready for my TEDGlobal 2011 talk on Inorganic Biology. It's about a revolution not evolution ... Sheril Kirshenbaum (@Sheril_): 4 days until TED Global conferences.ted.com/TEDGlobal2011 Choosing my final slides tonight... Robin Ince...

For Session 4 of TED2020, experts in biohacking, synthetic biology, psychology and beyond explored topics ranging from discovering the relationship between the spinal cord and asparagus to using tools of science to answer critical questions about racial bias. Below, a recap of the night's talks and performances. Andrew Pelling, biomedical...

"It's a great time to be a molecular biologist," says Ellen Jorgensen, a biologist who founded Genspace, a do-it-yourself genetics lab. By end of the year, for less than €1,000 you'll be able to sequence a human genome in less than a day. But, she asks: "Who gets to do it?" We know and trust the professionals -- are they the only ones all...

John Searle studies consciousness -- which, as he points out in today's talk, is a “curiously neglected subject in our scientific and philosophical culture.” Curiously -- because it is, after all, a pre-condition for anything else we think about. And yet neglected -- because consciousness is a subject that makes scientists huffy (they see it a...

TED Fellow Lucy McRae (watch her TED Talk) is a body architect -- an artist who explores how technology and the body may someday meet and merge. Her latest project is a fantastical and frothy music video for "Dream a Little Crazy” by Australian band Architecture in Helsinki. Watch the mouth-watering video above, and then read all about how Mc...

We're welcoming two guest hosts to TEDGlobal 2011 -- Pat Mitchell, from the Paley Center for Media, who hosts Session 8, and Matt Ridley, whose 2010 TEDTalk was memorably titled "When Ideas Have Sex," and who'll be hosting Session 5. We asked both hosts a few questions about their plans for their session of TED. Here's what TED's Jenny Zu...

Jack Andraka is not your typical teenager. The high schooler spends his free time in the science lab concocting better, cheaper ways to spot disease. One such project -- a test for the early detection of pancreatic cancer -- won Andraka first place in the 2012 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. As Andraka explains in his ta...

What will the urban areas of tomorrow look like? More like an ever-changing and vibrant garden than a static set of buildings and blocks. In our new ebook Living Architecture: How Synthetic Biology Can Remake Our Cities and Reshape Our Lives, British designer and architect Rachel Armstrong re-imagines the world’s cities and argues that in or...

Here’s a treat for Valentine’s Day: Take a close-up look at a decellularized “ghost heart.” This heart can serve as a scaffold upon which to grow a working heart from human stem cells. Researchers at the Texas Heart Institute created it by stripping all the living cells from a pig heart with a soap solution, which bursts the cells and leaves onl...

While the musical soundtrack is wholly a product of the imagination, everything else in this spellbinding animation of the HIV virus -- created by Janet Iwasa -- was based on the findings of researchers. University of Utah cellular biologist Janet Iwasa has spent much of the past four years engaged in discussions with dozens of HIV researchers....

TED science curator David Biello exposes the odd couple behind the de-extinction movement: scientists and hunters. What does this say about our ambivalent attitude toward animals? Our world is the setting of a great murder mystery: Where did all the big animals go? Although Earth is the scene of the crime for many deaths -- it is estimated that...

This session asks us to pay closer attention to what nature has to tell us -- both about itself and about the world around us. We'll investigate a variety of sources -- from the soundscapes of ecosystems to the neurons of cockroaches to the extraordinary sex lives of animals. Here are the speakers who appeared in this session of TEDGlobal 201...

On December 1st, TEDxWomen will take place at the Paley Centers in both New York and LA. Simultaneously, over 110 TEDxWomen events will be hosted by TEDx event Organizers in communities all around the world, including China, The Netherlands, Israel, Pakistan, Romania, South Africa, Lebanon and the United States. Besides watching the webcast of ...

Many people simply listen to music. Not David Byrne, the solo artist and former frontman of the Talking Heads. Even beyond making music, Byrne thinks deeply about how music functions on a perceptual level. At TED2010, Byrne spoke about how the nature of a space effects what kind of music is played there, from a gritty club like New York’s CBG...

An open-source project is striving to create the world’s first fully digital organism. Here’s a peek inside the tricky process that could bring us to a better understanding of life itself. A genius scientist creates an artificial being, it somehow gains free will and consciousness -- and then goes rogue. That’s been the basic plotline of storie...

To close out day 3 of TED2019, we imagine different versions of the future -- from the magical possibilities of deep-sea exploration to the dark future of humanity if something goes horribly wrong. Gulp. The event: Talks and performances from TED2019, Session 7: Possibility, hosted by TED's Helen Walters and Kelly Stoetzel When and whe...

Artist Julie Freeman uses data as a source material to make biologically inspired artworks -- giving musicality to the movement of fish and expressing city lights in the quiver of moths' wings. Now she's finding ways to translate data so that we may gain new perspectives on what it's trying to tell us. What do you do? I make artwork that a...