When Nancy Lublin started texting teenagers to help with her social advocacy organization, what she found was shocking — they started texting back about their own problems, from bullying to depression to abuse. So she’s setting up a text-only crisis line, and the results might be even more important than she expected.
TEDTalks (video)

When Nancy Lublin started texting teenagers to help with her social advocacy organization, what she found was shocking — they started texting back about their own problems, from bullying to depression to abuse. So she’s setting up a text-only crisis line, and the results might be even more important than she expected.
TEDTalks (video)

Eduardo Paes is the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, a sprawling, complicated, beautiful city of 6.5 million. He shares four big ideas about leading Rio — and all cities — into the future, including bold (and do-able) infrastructure upgrades and how to make a city “smarter.”
TEDTalks (video)

At the heart of modern cosmology is a mystery: Why does our universe appear so exquisitely tuned to create the conditions necessary for life? In this tour de force tour of some of science’s biggest new discoveries, Brian Greene shows how the mind-boggling idea of a multiverse may hold the answer to the riddle.
TEDTalks (video)

Imagine what we could learn about diseases by studying the history of human disease, from ancient hominids to the present. But how? TED Fellow Christina Warinner is an achaeological geneticist, and she’s found a spectacular new tool — the microbial DNA in fossilized dental plaque.
TEDTalks (video)

Our medical systems are broken. Doctors are capable of extraordinary (and expensive) treatments, but they are losing their core focus: actually treating people. Doctor and writer Atul Gawande suggests we take a step back and look at new ways to do medicine — with fewer cowboys and more pit crews.
TEDTalks (video)

TED Fellow Abigail Washburn wanted to be a lawyer improving US-China relations — until she picked up a banjo. She tells a moving story of the remarkable connections she’s formed touring across the United States and China while playing that banjo and singing in Chinese.
TEDTalks (video)

Empathy, cooperation, fairness and reciprocity — caring about the well-being of others seems like a very human trait. But Frans de Waal shares some surprising videos of behavioral tests, on primates and other mammals, that show how many of these moral traits all of us share.
TEDTalks (video)