TED Talks Daily

Majd Mashharawi was walking through her war-torn neighborhood in Gaza when an idea flashed in her mind: What if she could take the rubble and transform it into building materials?…

In 2013, a treasure trove of unusual fossils were uncovered in a cave in South Africa, and researchers soon realized: these were the remains of a new species of ancient humans. Pal…

Farida Nabourema has dedicated her life to fighting the military regime in Togo, Africa's oldest autocracy. She's learned two truths along the way: no country is destined to be opp…

The transistors that power the phone in your pocket are unimaginably small: you can fit more than 3,000 of them across the width of a human hair. But to keep up with innovations in…

Lindy Lou Isonhood grew up in a town where the death penalty was a fact of life, part of the unspoken culture. But after she served as a juror in a capital murder trial -- and vote…

What is a border? It's a line on a map, a place where cultures mix and merge in beautiful, sometimes violent and occasionally ridiculous ways. And a border wall? An overly simplist…

There's no greater freedom than finding your purpose, says education advocate Ashweetha Shetty. Born to a poor family in rural India, Shetty didn't let the social norms of her comm…

When one of Liz Kleinrock's fourth-grade students said the unthinkable at the start of a class on race, she knew it was far too important a teachable moment to miss. But where to s…

In the US, the very same blood test can cost $19 at one clinic and $522 at another clinic just blocks away -- and nobody knows the difference until they get a bill weeks later. Jou…

Roy Bahat was worried. His company invests in new technology like AI to make businesses more efficient -- but, he wondered, what was AI doing to the people whose jobs might change,…

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin talks about what we can learn from American presidents, including Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson. Then she shares a moving memory of her own fath…

Gene-editing tools like CRISPR enable us to program life at its most fundamental level. But this raises some pressing questions: If we can generate new species from scratch, what s…

What does it mean to be civil? JournalistStevenPetrow looks for answers in the original meaning of the word, showing why civility shouldn't be dismissed as conversation-stifling po…

Modern American health care is defined by its high costs, high overhead and inaccessibility -- especially for low-income patients. What if we could redesign the system to serve the…

Silence is a rare commodity these days. There's traffic, construction, air-conditioning, your neighbor's lawnmower ... and all this unwanted sound can have a surprising impact on y…

Activist Shad Begum has spent her life empowering women to live up to their full potential. In a personal talk, she shares her determined struggle to improve the lives of women in…

J.D. Vance grew up in a small, poor city in the Rust Belt of southern Ohio, where he had a front-row seat to many of the social ills plaguing America: a heroin epidemic, failing sc…

There's no better way to stop a disease than to catch and treat it early, before symptoms occur. That's the whole point of medical screening techniques like radiography, MRIs and b…

You know the "forgotten middle": they're the students, coworkers and regular people who are often overlooked because they're seen as neither exceptional nor problematic. How can we…

Is women's sexuality actually more complicated than men's? The answer is no, says author Sarah Barmak. In an eye-opening talk, she shows how a flawed understanding of the female bo…