As the cofounder and executive director of Waterford UPSTART, Claudia Miner has one goal: to help families overcome barriers and prepare their children for lifelong learning.

Can folding a piece of paper 45 times get you to the moon? By seeing what happens when folding just one piece of paper we see the unbelievable potential of exponential growth. This lesson will leave you wanting to grab a piece of paper to see how many times you can fold it! [Lesson by Adrian Paenza, directed by TED-Ed, narrated by Adrian Paenza].

Heribert Watzke studies the brain in our gut -- and works to develop new kinds of food that will satisfy our bodies and minds.

One bag of apples, one apple, one slice of apple-- which of these is one unit? Explore the basic unit of math (explained by a trip to the grocery store!) and discover the many meanings of one. [Directed by Biljana Labovic, narrated by Christopher Danielson].

A physicist, cosmologist and gifted science communicator, Sean Carroll is asking himself -- and asking us to consider -- questions that get at the fundamental nature of the universe.

A two-term U.S. Poet Laureate, Billy Collins captures readers with his understated wit, profound insight -- and a sense of being "hospitable."

Design legend Niels Diffrient talks about his life in industrial design (and the reason he became a designer instead of a jet pilot). He details his quest to completely rethink the office chair starting from one fundamental data set: the human body.

When faced with a parent suffering from Alzheimer's, most of us respond with denial ("It won't happen to me") or extreme efforts at prevention. But global health expert and TED Fellow Alanna Shaikh sees it differently. She's taking three concrete steps to prepare for the moment -- should it arrive -- when she herself gets Alzheimer's disease.

Whether she's describing bickering families, quiet declarations of love, or juicy gossip, Jane Austen's writing often feels as though it was written just for you. Her dry wit and cheeky playfulness informs her heroines, whose conversational tone welcomes readers with a conspiratorial wink. Iseult Gillespie explores the sly societal satire and un...

Ed Ulbrich, the digital-effects guru from Digital Domain, explains the Oscar-winning technology that allowed his team to digitally create the older versions of Brad Pitt's face for "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."

Amy Smith designs cheap, practical fixes for tough problems in developing countries. Among her many accomplishments, the MIT engineer received a MacArthur "genius" grant in 2004 and was the first woman to win the Lemelson-MIT Prize for turning her ideas into inventions.

Through hit television shows like “The Office” and “The Good Place,” Michael Schur uses his creative genius to bring warmth and comedy to the screen.

Sebastian Seung is a leader in the new field of connectomics, currently the hottest space in neuroscience, which studies, in once-impossible detail, the wiring of the brain.

After years of research on touch-driven computer displays, Jeff Han has created a simple, multi-touch, multi-user screen interface that just might herald the end of the point-and-click era.

Home is where the heart is ... but how do you make room for the office? Draw expert advice from these talks to help you stay productive, achieve work-life balance and gain professional confidence as a remote employee.

Richard Sears thinks hard about the post-oil world. He's a visiting scientist at MIT, after a long career as a VP at Shell.

Lars Fæste helps CEOs transform their businesses and over the years he's noticed something troubling: managers tend to get comfortable during times of success and fail to be on constant lookout for ways to grow. Yet with today's unprecedented rate of change, constant transformation is the norm and adapting to it is the key to staying ahead of co...

David Merrill works on Siftables, tiny computer blocks that interact with each other to make networks (and music).

The Sleepy Man Banjo Boys is made up of 11-year-old banjo sensation Jonny Mizzone and his brothers Robbie, 14, on fiddle, and Tommy, 15, on guitar.

In 2013, a group of researchers wanted to create an AI system that could beat every Atari game. They developed a system called Deep Q Networks (DQN) and less than two years later, it was superhuman. But there was one notable exception. When playing Montezuma's Revenge, DQN couldn't score a single point. What was it that made this game so vexingl...

All new products must pass through the "valley of death" before they reach the market. Many never make it out, and sometimes that's OK -- if they don't work, don't fill a need or for any number of reasons. One of the fields where this problem is most pressing is zero-carbon technologies. Why is it vulnerable to this trap, and can we change it? E...

Bina Venkataraman is the Editorial Page Editor of the Boston Globe, a professor at MIT and the author of "The Optimist's Telescope."

When Allison Hunt found out that she needed a new hip -- and that Canada’s national health care system would require her to spend nearly 2 years on a waiting list (and in pain) -- she took matters into her own hands.

Nilofer Merchant suggests a small idea that just might have a big impact on your life and health: Next time you have a one-on-one meeting, make it into a "walking meeting" -- and let ideas flow while you walk and talk.

Some of the world's greatest minds swore by the benefits of taking a stroll. Make your next walk better (or even just go for a mental walk in the woods) with these rousing talks.

Dave Meslin is a "professional rabble-rouser." Based in Toronto, he works to make local issues engaging and even fun to get involved in.

Tyler DeWitt recognizes that textbooks are not the way to get young people interested in science. Instead, he teaches science by making it fun and fantastical.

You're lifting weights. The first time feels easy, but each lift takes more and more effort until you can't continue. Inside your arms, the muscles responsible for the lifting have become unable to contract. What's going on? Christian Moro explains how exactly our muscles operate, and what causes them to become fatigued. [Directed by Nichola Lat...

SETI researcher Seth Shostak bets that we will find extraterrestrial life in the next twenty-four years, or he'll buy you a cup of coffee. He explains why new technologies and the laws of probability make the breakthrough so likely -- and predicts how the discovery of civilizations far more advanced than ours might affect us here on Earth.

In a disturbing — but fascinating — walk through history, Frances Larson examines humanity's strange relationship with public executions … and specifically beheadings. As she shows us, they have always drawn a crowd, first in the public square and now on YouTube. What makes them horrific and compelling in equal measure?