Paul MacCready -- aircraft designer, environmentalist, and lifelong lover of flight -- talks about his long career.

The coronavirus brought much of the world to a standstill, dropping carbon emissions by five percent. Al Gore says keeping those rates down is now up to us. In this illuminating interview, he discusses how the steadily declining cost of wind and solar energy will transform manufacturing, transportation and agriculture, offer a cheaper alternativ...

The Sun delivers more energy to Earth in one hour than all of humanity uses in an entire year. How can we make this power more accessible to everyone, everywhere? Solar designer Marjan van Aubel shows how she's turning everyday objects like tabletops and stained glass windows into elegant solar cells -- and shares her vision to make every surfac...

Every Google search or YouTube upload costs the global network both energy and resources. As Google's head of sustainability, it's Kate E. Brandt's job to strategize solutions that cut the cost on our environment and our economy. In an innovative talk, she dives into her plan to green up Google by creating a circular economy which reuses, recycl...

Solar-powered LED lightbulbs could transform the lives of rural Haitians, but as Daniel Schnitzer found, they don't simply sell themselves. At TEDxPittsburgh, he shows how smart health and energy products for the developing world are useless unless the market works too.

Adam Grosser is a general partner at Foundation Capital -- and a refrigeration visionary.

Chernobyl was the site of the world's worst nuclear accident and, for the past 27 years, the area around the plant has been known as the Exclusion Zone. And yet, a community of about 200 people live there -- almost all of them elderly women. These proud grandmas defied orders to relocate because their connection to their homeland and to their co...

What should you do with your paycheck? These talks offer reframes to help you save, spend and give — with intention.

As an information theorist and computer scientist, David MacKay uses hard math to assess our renewable energy options.

In 1967, Homer Loutzenheuser flipped a switch and connected the power grids of the United States, forming one interconnected machine. Today, the US power grid is the world's largest machine, containing more than 7,300 electricity-generating plants. So how exactly do these power plants work? Henry Richardson digs into the delicate balancing act o...

At TED2010, Bill Gates unveils his vision for the world's energy future, describing the need for "miracles" to avoid planetary catastrophe and explaining why he's backing a dramatically different type of nuclear reactor. The necessary goal? Zero carbon emissions globally by 2050.

Holly Morris tells the stories of women around the world through documentary, television, print and the web.

Susan Shaw is an internationally recognized marine toxicologist, author and explorer.

Physicist Patricia Burchat sheds light on two basic ingredients of our universe: dark matter and dark energy. Comprising 96% of the universe between them, they can't be directly measured, but their influence is immense.

During the hot summer months, watching an outdoor sports match or concert can be tantamount to baking uncomfortably in the sun -- but it doesn't have to be. At the TEDxSummit in Doha, physicist Wolfgang Kessling reveals sustainable design innovations that cool us from above and below, and even collects solar energy for later use.

A net-zero future is possible, but first we need to flip a mental switch to truly understand that we can stop the climate crisis if we try, says Nobel laureate Al Gore. In this inspiring and essential talk, Gore shares examples of extreme climate events (think: fires, floods and atmospheric tsunamis), identifies the man-made systems holding us b...

Rob Hopkins is the founder of the Transition movement, a radically hopeful and community-driven approach to creating societies independent of fossil fuel.

Taylor Wilson was 14 when he built a nuclear fusion reactor in his parents' garage. Now 19, he returns to the TED stage to present a new take on an old topic: fission. Wilson, who has won backing to create a company to realize his vision, explains why he's so excited about his innovative design for small modular fission reactors -- and why it co...

How can a super-thin 3-inch disk levitate something 70,000 times its own weight? In a riveting demonstration, Boaz Almog shows how a phenomenon known as quantum locking allows a superconductor disk to float over a magnetic rail -- completely frictionlessly and with zero energy loss. Experiment: Prof. Guy Deutscher, Mishael Azoulay, Boaz Almog, o...

Climate researcher Alice Bows-Larkin connects her academic research to the broader policy context, helping create policies to deal with our changing planet.

With dynamic energy and infectious beats, TED Fellow "Blinky" Bill Sellanga delivers an uplifting performance of four songs.

When you picture the lowest levels of the food chain, you might imagine herbivores happily munching on lush, living green plants. But this idyllic image leaves out a huge (and slightly less appetizing) source of nourishment: dead stuff. John C. Moore details the "brown food chain," explaining how such unlikely delicacies as pond scum and animal ...

Why is Al Gore optimistic about climate change? In this spirited talk, Gore asks three powerful questions about the man-made forces threatening to destroy our planet -- and the solutions we're designing to combat them. (Featuring Q&A with TED curator Chris Anderson)

When he was just 14 years old, Malawian inventor William Kamkwamba built his family an electricity-generating windmill from spare parts, working from rough plans he found in a library book.

Biochar is a kind of charcoal that removes CO2 from the atmosphere, helping yield healthy crops and even producing abundant renewable energy in the form of electricity as it's made. This exciting climate change fighter is ready for scaling now. Entrepreneur Axel Reinaud outlines three ways to make this material more accessible to farmers -- so t...

As of 2020, the world's biggest lithium-ion battery is hooked up to the Southern California power grid and can provide enough power for about 250,000 homes. But it's actually not the biggest battery in the world: a pair of lakes are. How can lakes be a battery? Explore how inventors are rethinking what a battery can be, and how these surprising ...

The shape, contents and future of the universe are all intricately related. We know that it's mostly flat; we know that it's made up of baryonic matter (like stars and planets), but mostly dark matter and dark energy; and we know that it's expanding constantly, so that all stars will eventually burn out into a cold nothingness. Renée Hlozek expa...

When the son of the president of a desperately poor country starts buying mansions and sportscars on an official monthly salary of $7,000, Charmian Gooch suggests, corruption is probably somewhere in the picture. In a blistering, eye-opening talk (with several specific examples), she details how global corruption trackers follow the money -- to ...

What if we looked at Parkinson's as an neurological electrical problem? Brain researcher Eleftheria Pissadaki and her team study dopamine neurons, the neurons that selectively die during Parkinson's. They discovered that the bigger a neuron is, the more vulnerable it becomes because it simply requires more energy. This new insight is reframing t...

Facilitator Jason Jay dissects how conversations sour, offering ways to move past the discomfort and even harness the creative energy of disagreement.