Budgeting is the best way to get your spending under control, right? Behavioral scientist Wendy De La Rosa says there are actually better ways to limit your purchases -- and get more satisfaction from them.

Imagine trying to use words to describe every scene in a film, every note in a song, or every street in your town. Now imagine trying to do it using only the numbers 1 and 0. Every time you use the Internet to watch a movie, listen to music, or check directions, that's exactly what your device is doing, using the language of binary code. José Am...

Why are we so obsessed with World War II? Historian Keith Lowe thinks the answer lies in what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget about history. In his talk, Lowe describes the grey areas of an epochal event often considered in black and white terms, and argues that we need to challenge our assumptions to avoid repeating historica...

Leah Chase's New Orleans restaurant Dooky Chase changed the course of American history over gumbo and fried chicken. During the civil rights movement, it was a place where white and black people came together, where activists planned protests and where the police entered but did not disturb -- and it continues to operate in the same spirit today...

In this captivating talk, journey into the surprisingly colorful nights of the Amazon Rainforest, as artistic entomologist Leo Lanna and designer Lvcas Fiat introduce us to the shapeshifting wonder of a creature they've fallen in love with: the praying mantis. Using an innovative approach that fuses science, art and conservation, Lanna and Fiat ...

Can we edit the content of our memories? It's a sci-fi-tinged question that Steve Ramirez and Xu Liu are asking in their lab at MIT. Essentially, the pair shoot a laser beam into the brain of a living mouse to activate and manipulate its memory. In this unexpectedly amusing talk they share not only how, but -- more important -- why they do this.

What happens before a murder? In looking for ways to reduce death penalty cases, David R. Dow realized that a surprising number of death row inmates had similar biographies. In this talk he proposes a bold plan, one that prevents murders in the first place.

How will the rise of artificial intelligence change our world? Former head of Google China Kai-Fu Lee and science-fiction writer Chen Qiufan (aka Stanley Chan) set out to answer this question in their new book "AI 2041: Ten Visions for the Future." In this wide-ranging discussion, they imagine different possibilities -- both from the imaginative...

On sunny days, citizens of ancient Rome could be found exchanging news and gossip while attending to more urgent business at the public latrines. Today, most cultures consider trips to the restroom to be a more private occasion. But even when going alone, our shared sewage infrastructure is one of the most pivotal inventions in human history. Fr...

Warning: This talk might contain much more than you'd ever want to know about the way the world poops. But as sanitation activist (and TED Fellow) Francis de los Reyes asks — doesn't everyone deserve a safe place to go?

Peter Ouko spent 18 years in Kamiti Prison in Kenya, sometimes locked up in a cell with 13 other grown men for 23 and a half hours a day. In a moving talk, he tells the story of how he was freed -- and his current mission with the African Prisons Project: to set up the first law school behind bars and empower people in prison to drive positive c...

Do you think Hollywood needs to change? How about your own industry? It's difficult to get decision makers to step outside of the tried-and-true and attempt something new. In this episode, host Chris Duffy sits down with Franklin Leonard -- founder and CEO of the Black List, a company that elevates great screenplays and the writers who create th...

Is torture ever justified? Would you steal a drug that your child needs to survive? Is it sometimes wrong to tell the truth? How much is one human life worth? In the "Justice" program that bears his name, Harvard professor Michael Sandel probes these questions -- and asks what you think, and why.

Feeling like the world is becoming less friendly? Social theorist Jonathan Zittrain begs to differ. The Internet, he suggests, is made up of millions of disinterested acts of kindness, curiosity and trust.

"How fast are you moving?" seems like an easy question, but it's actually quite complicated -- and perhaps best answered by another question: "Relative to what?" Even when you think you're standing still, the Earth is moving relative to the Sun, which is moving relative to the Milky Way, which is...you get the idea. Tucker Hiatt unravels the con...

Plants are amazing machines -- for millions of years, they've taken carbon dioxide out of the air and stored it underground, keeping a crucial check on the global climate. Plant geneticist Joanne Chory is working to amplify this special ability: with her colleagues at the Salk Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology Laboratory, she's creating plant...

When cancer cells are closely packed together in a tumor, they're able to communicate with each other and coordinate their movement throughout the body. What if we could interrupt this process? In this accessible talk about cutting-edge science, Hasini Jayatilaka shares her work on an innovative method to stop cancer cells from communicating -- ...

Every human deserves protection under their country’s laws — even when that law is forgotten or ignored. Sharing three cases from her international legal practice, Kimberley Motley, an American litigator practicing in Afghanistan and elsewhere, shows how a country’s own laws can bring both justice and “justness”: using the law for its intended p...

As a lawyer, Andrew Arruda too often saw the scales of justice tip in favor of the wealthy and partnered with a computer scientist to create the world's first artificially intelligent legal assistant, ROSS. By speeding up legal research, Arruda wants ROSS to make the practice of law cheaper and fulfill the original promise of "justice for all."

In the 1600s, the Dutch East India Company employed hundreds of ships to trade goods around the globe. In order to fund their voyages, the company turned to private citizens to invest money to support trips in exchange for a share of the profits. In doing so, they unknowingly invented the world's first stock market. So how do companies and inves...

"Cutting methane is the single fastest, most effective opportunity to reduce climate change risks in the near term," says atmospheric scientist Ilissa Ocko. That's because, unlike carbon dioxide, methane's warming power doesn't come from a gradual buildup over time but is almost entirely from recent emissions. Ocko identifies three main sources ...

Have you found yourself staying up late, joylessly bingeing TV shows and doomscrolling through the news, or simply navigating your day uninspired and aimless? Chances are you're languishing, says organizational psychologist Adam Grant -- a psychic malaise that has become all too common after many months of the pandemic. He breaks down the key in...

Medical, legal, and financial documents should be easy to read, but too often they aren't. With spot-on (and funny) examples, Sandra Fisher Martins shows how overly complex language separates us from the information we need -- and three steps to change that. In Portuguese with English subtitles.

Who's liable if a passenger is injured on the first spacecraft to take tourists off-planet? For that matter, what's the legal definition of a spacecraft? Professor of space law Frans von der Dunk deploys lawyer jokes and policy critiques to illustrate how the world is woefully unprepared for the legal implications of space travel.

Tax forms, credit agreements, healthcare legislation: They're crammed with gobbledygook, says Alan Siegel, and incomprehensibly long. He calls for a simple, sensible redesign -- and plain English -- to make legal paperwork intelligible to the rest of us.

William Black is a former bank regulator who’s seen firsthand how banking systems can be used to commit fraud — and how “liar's loans” and other tricky tactics led to the 2008 US banking crisis that threatened the international economy. In this engaging talk, Black, now an academic, reveals the best way to rob a bank — from the inside.

When you're enjoying yourself and time passes quickly, that is an experience known as "flow." Musician Diane Allen explains how to find your own flow and ways to design for it in order to reach your fullest potential.

We're all familiar with satellite imagery, but what we might not know is that much of it is out of date. That's because satellites are big and expensive, so there aren't that many of them up in space. As he explains in this fascinating talk, Dan Berkenstock and his team came up with a different solution, designing a cheap, lightweight satellite ...

As a judge with decades of experience presiding over juvenile courts, Wesley Saint Clair repeatedly encountered the same problem -- the fact that the system was designed for punishment instead of rehabilitation or crime reduction. He draws on that experience to explain why the use of restorative practices should be prioritized in the juvenile ju...

Drew Curtis, the founder of fark.com, tells the story of how he fought a lawsuit from a company that had a patent, "...for the creation and distribution of news releases via email." Along the way he shares some nutty statistics about the growing legal problem of frivolous patents.