It is decorated with fingerprints applied in red ochre that are similar to those found in the wall paintings in the cave. It was originally thought to have been used as a ceremonial cup, until new analyses in 2021 revealed that the shell was modified to be used as a musical wind instrument.

CNRS

Broken stalagmites arranged in circles indicate that humans started occupying caves more than 100 millennia before previously thought and knew how to use fire to navigate dark spaces well before Homo Sapiens.

Thomas Suddendorf TED Talk

“Our exceedingly mysterious and unique status on earth may be largely our own, rather than God’s creation.” What does this mean for our future?

Svante Pääbo, TED

Sharing the results of a massive, worldwide study, geneticist Svante Pääbo shows the DNA proof that early humans mated with Neanderthals after we moved out of Africa.

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

A series of experiments testing altruism in both very young children and chimpanzees.

PBS NOVA ScienceNOW

Watch the amazing story of how the genetic history of lice gives us clues to mysteries of our own evolution.

SABC Digital news

Explore the oldest known workshop for the deliberate planning, production and storage of a pigmented compound and for the use of a container.

New Scientist

Paleolithic animated pictures.

National Geographic

Researchers set up tests to show that great apes can recognize themselves in the mirror.

Spencer Wells takes us, as he says, on a journey that began “a long time ago [when] your family were on the brink of dying out. Yet, somehow against impossible odds they managed not only to survive but to become the most successful people on the planet.”

Such flutes were made from vulture bones and ivory from mammoth tusks. This one was found in the Swabian Jura mountains in southern Germany along with a bullroarer, which might have been used for dramatic effect. with a carved set of lines on it that resemble those found in cave paintings, indicating a trance state.

Ian Morris, Stanford Alumni

Are democracy and gender equality always good? Are violence and wealth inequality always bad? This presentation will dive into what drives changes in human values and what we as a society consider good or evil.

Ian Morris, The RSA

Combining history, anthropology and social science, Stanford historian and archaeologist Ian Morris looks afresh at our global past, present and future.

Dr. Eleanor Robinson, University of Cambridge

Learn to write numbers using the Babylonian base-60 system.

Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky shows how our language can even change what color you see when you look out at the world.

Ted Talk

UCTVSeminars

Do speakers of different languages think differently? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do bilinguals think differently when speaking different languages? Does language shape our thinking only when we’re speaking, or does it shape our attentional and cognitive patterns more broadly?

The Hurrian Hymn is history’s oldest known song. It’s the earliest written song that can be reconstructed.

A BBC documentary about the history of numbers, and in particular, the number 1.

BBC

A BBC documentary about the history of numbers, and in particular, the number 1.

Marcus de Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, reveals the vital importance of the Bakhshali Manuscript to the history of mathematics. Surviving leaf fragments from this birch bark scroll originate from the Indian subcontinent. They are over 1,800 years old and provide the first evidence to date of the invention of zero.

Science in the Golden Age of Islam.

BBC

How did the first farmers sustain a large community and build Göbekli Tepe 12,000 years ago?

This film tells the magnificent story of a temple complex is so impeccably preserved, with evidence so clear, that it might as well have been carved yesterday.

By Jim Al-Khalili.

Bart D. Ehrman, Heyns Lecture Series, Stanford University

How might the process of transcription have led to misunderstandings of the life and teachings of Jesus?

What cultural role did this 4.4″ tall statuette of a female figure play in society over 25,000 years ago?

An animated version of Plato’s The Allegory of the Cave.

BBC full series with Jim Al-Khalili

The history of Islamic science and it’s subsequent spread through Europe.

National Geographic

Many secrets remain surrounding the creation of Stonehenge. Archaeologists try to unravel the mystery.

Around 1,200 BC, an ancient Armageddon destroyed nearly every known civilization. What could have caused it? The theories are many, but most now include one mysterious and massively destructive factor – a force only the Egyptians survived to name: The Sea People.

Paul Goldsmith, ASC and Alan P. Garfinkel

Hidden away in the canyons of a top secret military base on the edge of the Mojave Desert is the largest concentration of rock art in North America. Created over thousands of years by a now vanished culture, it represents the oldest art in California. Talking Stone explores the remote canyons and mysteries surrounding these amazing images.

Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt's latest book, The Anxious Generation, is shaping cultural conversations and sparking fierce debates about the role of smartphones in society. In this timely conversation, he investigates how a smartphone-based childhood, amplified by overprotective parenting, is driving the mental health crisis among young people. He also explores the push for phone bans in schools and the concrete steps we can take to improve the mental health of young people around the world.

International Energy Agency

The IEA’s latest report, Digitalization & Energy, is the first-ever comprehensive effort to depict how digital technologies could transform the world’s energy systems.

National Geographic

Based on the book by Jared Diamond.

Stanford University School of Engineering

Renée DiResta is research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, a multi-disciplinary center that focuses on abuses of information technology, particularly social media. She’s an expert in the role technology platforms and their “curatorial” algorithms play in the rise and spread of misinformation and disinformation.

The vast majority of US teens have access to a smartphone and at least one social media account, and recent headlines seem to confirm parents’ worst fears about the effects of all that time spent online. But psychologists’ research suggests that there are nuanced answers to the question of how social media affects teens’ mental health and well-being. Linda Charmaraman, PhD, director of the Youth, Media, and Wellbeing Research Lab at the Wellesley Centers for Women, discusses how teens use social media today, its impact on their mental health, and what parents, educators and others can do to maximize its benefits and minimize its potential harms.

Learn why and how plastic was originally developed and how we have reaped the wonderful benefits of this unique material while inadvertently creating our current struggle with its disposal and dangers.

Oxford Martin School

Al Gore surveys our planet’s beclouded horizon and offers a sober, learned, and ultimately hopeful forecast. In The Future, Gore identifies the emerging forces that are reshaping our world.

TED 2016

Al Gore, founder and chairman of The Climate Reality Project, poses three questions that will determine the future of our planet---and why there’s good reason to be optimistic.

Mark Jacobson presents solutions for global warming and air pollution and energy price stability.

National Geographic

This epic documentary follows Leonard DiCaprio’s 3-year journey around the world to examine firsthand the effects of climate change and delivers a hopeful view of how we can prevent catastrophic damage that could make the Earth unsustainable for human life.

Professor Ruth DeFries asks “How did we get to be the species that dominates the planet? Can we see any pattern? Can we see any guidance for the future by taking this long lens back on our domination?”

Globally, one out of three people don’t have ready access to safe drinking water. Why can’t we just take seawater, filter out the salt, and have an unlimited supply of clean, fresh water? Find out why this is a last resort.

The Ocean Cleanup is a nonprofit working on methods of cleaning our oceans of plastic—including stopping plastic from entering the ocean in the first place. This video explains their unique technology for cleaning debris from our rivers to prevent the pollution from spreading to the oceans.

Center for Large Landscape Conservation

Learn how all of us can help avoid landscape fragmentation, where roads and other human activities divide habitat into isolated patches and make it difficult for wildlife to thrive.

Sandra Faber, Kraw Lecture Series, UC Santa Cruz

National Medal of Science winner Sandra Faber describes how the profound insights of cosmology take the issue of sustainability out of the personal and into a more objective consideration of where---and if---we are going.

Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) / Pathways for Wildlife

We know from scientific studies and Native American records that coyotes and badgers have been known to hunt together. But this is the first documentation (that we know of) where a coyote and badger use a human-made structure to travel together safely.

Extinction Radio

Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak—sooner than you think.

It’s almost impossible to imagine the magnitude of waste created by our simple, everyday habits. This depiction of the plastic bottles we discard vividly demonstrates the extent of plastic refuse.

Learn the details of how plastic recycling is actually done—and why it’s so difficult to do effectively.

Learn the way that climate change is causing extreme storms, drought and floods.

What has googly eyes and is cleaning up the harbor of Baltimore, USA? Meet the Trash Wheel Family – Mr. Trash Wheel, Professor Trash Wheel, Captain Trash Wheel, and Gwynnda the Good Wheel of the West.

Cambridge Conservation Initiative

Several recent restoration projects on both land and sea provide cause for real optimism and demonstrate how we can make ecosystems more resilient and enable species to return to their natural habitats.

The Swim

It’s not an island twice the size of Texas. But it is severely impacting marine life and human health… and incredibly hard to study.

It’s Okay to Be Smart

This time, we’re the asteroid. A history of mass extinctions.

Elizabeth Kolbert, Heinz Award-winning staff writer for the New Yorker and author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (2006), discusses her book The Sixth Extinction at OSU.

Is one degree of warming really that big a deal? Yes, it is, and find out why it could lead to even greater climate threats.

Center for Large Landscape Conservation

This video illustrates the importance of large landscape conservation—why connected natural areas are so critical—not only for wildlife, but for all of us.

Future West

This video illustrates how ranchers in the western U.S.A manage their land, including its wildlife, and see why working ranches are critical to habitat connectivity and wildlife preservation.

William Easterly, Google Talks

The author of The White Man’s Burden, discusses his book that changed the debate on aid, and the role the West should play to promote economic, social, and political development in the developing world.

RSA

Watch Joseph E. Stiglitz’ lecture delivered in 2014 at RSA Scotland on the topic of Creating a Learning Society.

Bank for International Settlements

Cryptocurrencies’ decentralised model of generating trust limits their potential to replace conventional money.

Fusion Universal

See a 5-minute summary of C.K Prahalad’s book on how great companies through social entrepreneurship can help alleviate global poverty by servicing the vast market of the world’s poorest people.

UNESCO

Freedom of information is closely linked to a culture of openness. Open and inclusive societies protect press freedom crucial to sustainable development.

TEDx

Economic theory is centuries out of date and that’s a disaster for tackling the 21st century’s challenges of climate change, poverty, and extreme inequality. Kate Raworth flips economic thinking on its head to give a crash course in alternative economics, explaining in three minutes what they’ll never teach you in three years of a degree. Find out why it’s time to get into the doughnut…

Global Community Initiatives

Bernard Lietaer prepared a report for the Club of Rome on the link between our monetary system and the unsustainable trends in the world---this is a summary of the report.

BYU Kennedy Center

Four faculty members share their perspective on William Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden.

Thomson Reuters Foundation

For those who escaped the famines of the 1980s, the current drought in Ethiopia brings back memories of a time they hoped never to see again. Experiencing the worst drought in 50 years, residents of Tsemera in the Northern Highlands have seen their streams dry up and their crops fail.

Nicholas Kristof, New York Times

In July 2015 Nicholas Kristof travelled to South Sudan to cover the war-driven famine and the need for peace.

Paul Collier, TED

Around the world right now, one billion people are trapped in poor or failing countries. How can we help them? Economist Paul Collier lays out a bold, compassionate plan for closing the gap between rich and poor.

Founders Pledge

Who are the makers and takers in our economy? If we want sustainable and fair economic growth, Professor Mazzucato argues, we need to question the stories we’ve been told about value creation.

TED

French economist Thomas Piketty caused a sensation in early 2014 with his book on a simple, brutal formula explaining economic inequality: r > g (meaning that return on capital is generally higher than economic growth). Here, he talks through the massive data set that led him to conclude: Economic inequality is not new, but it is getting worse, with radical possible impacts.

BRAC

Children are able to explore different aspects of their identity and increase collaboration through play.

Sugatra Mitra, TED

Sugatra Mitra’s idea for a School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can explore and learn from each other using resources and mentoring from the cloud. Hear his inspiring vision for Self Organized Learning Environments (SOLE), and learn more.

Yong Zhao, Network for Public Education National Conference

Yong Zhao’s lively address brings a thought-provoking perspective on comparing U.S. and Chinese student test scores as a way to evaluate our education systems.

Alanna Shaikh, TEDx

Global health expert Alanna Shaikh talks about the current status of the 2019 nCov coronavirus outbreak and what this can teach us about the epidemics yet to come.

Sir Ken Robinson, TED

Here the entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity

Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, Stanford Univ.

Discover how passive exposure, alongside active practice, can significantly enhance the learning process.

Yong Zhao & Andreas Schleicher, Schools & Academies Show Birmingham 2018

Education scholars Yong Zhao and Andreas Schleicher share their divergent views on the pros and cons of OECD’s international testing program.

Nationally renowned neuroscientist BJ Casey’s lecture highlights unique vulnerabilities along with tremendous opportunities for growth and change in adolescents; clarify the current state of the science on typical behavioral and brain development during adolescence that extends beyond 18 years of age; and demonstrate that behavior, personality, and psychopathic traits are dynamic and show continued change beyond adolescence. The science was discussed in the context of rethinking the ways in which young offenders are treated in the justice system.

David Sobel

The Health Benefits of Sensuality, Optimism and Altruism

Kelly McGonigal

Psychologist Kelly McGonigal urges us to see stress as a positive, and introduces us to an unsung mechanism for stress reduction: reaching out to others.

Bill Gates, Chris Anderson & Whitney Pennington Rogers, TED

Bill Gates offers insights into the COVID-19 pandemic, discussing why testing and self-isolation are essential, which medical advancements show promise and what it will take for the world to endure this crisis.

Rural public school teacher wins $1M Global Teacher Prize

Peter Tabichi left his private school job to teach science and math in the ill-equipped public secondary school in Kenya’s remote Pwani Village. His students garnered recognition from The Royal Society of Chemistry for harnessing local plant life to generate electricity.

Salman Khan at TED

Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script — give students video lectures to watch at home, and do “homework” in the classroom with the teacher available to help.

Share Literacy

Programs that work: Over the past 16 years, Share Literacy has served over 690,000 disadvantaged children in the U.S. and other countries providing low cost books, training materials, and professional development services.

One moment can change everything.

Geoffrey Canada, TED

Why does our education system look the way it did 50 years ago? Millions of students were failing then, as they are now—and it’s because we’re clinging to a business model that clearly doesn’t work. Education advocate Geoffrey Canada dares the system to make systematic shifts in order to help greater numbers of kids excel.

Books for Afghanistan
Books for Pakistan

The literacy needs of Afghan and Pakistani children are crucial to the stability and progress of their countries and the region, yet their ability to educate its children in turbulent years is severely impeded.

Dr. Patricia K. Kuhl and Dr. Andrew N. Meltzoff, internationally recognized experts in child development and co-directors of the University of Washington Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences explain the essential components that make early childhood learning a big bang that no child should miss, and society can’t ignore.

Neuroscience tells us there is joy in not knowing what is coming next. Uncertainty is part of what makes life interesting. Yet, most adults describe a strong feeling of discomfort around uncertainty. On the other hand, adolescents thrive on uncertainty; it is their superpower. How might we embrace uncertainty as our superpower and, along the way, better understand the adolescent brain? Dr. Adriana Galván, PhD, is a professor of psychology at UCLA whose expertise is in adolescent brain development.

Sugatra Mitra, TED

Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education — the best teachers and schools don’t exist where they’re needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.

Sugata Mitra, TEDxNewcastle

Almost twenty years of experiments with children’s education takes us through a series of startling results – children can self organise their own learning, they can achieve educational objectives on their own, can read by themselves.

Jane McGonigal

In this moving talk, McGonigal explains how a game can boost resilience—and promises to add 7.5 minutes to your life.

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, TED

Why do teenagers seem so much more impulsive, so much less self-aware than grown-ups? Cognitive neuroscientist Sarah-Jayne Blakemore compares the prefrontal cortex in adolescents to that of adults, to show us how typically “teenage” behavior is caused by the growing and developing brain.

Bill Gates, TED

In 2014, the world avoided a global outbreak of Ebola, thanks to thousands of selfless health workers — plus, frankly, some very good luck. In hindsight, we know what we should have done better. Now’s the time to put all our good ideas into practice, from scenario planning to vaccine research to health worker training.

Speakers: BJ Casey, Neuroscientist, Barnard College-Columbia University and Diana Chao, Mental Health Activist and Founder of Letters to Strangers. Moderated by Emily Underwood, Science Content Producer, Knowable Magazine.

A conversation about the teenage brain’s strengths and vulnerabilities, how adults can support teenagers with mental health issues, and how teens can help one another.

There’s a common stereotype is that teenagers’ brains are immature and underdeveloped, and that teens are “hard-wired” to take unwise risks and cave to peer pressure. But psychologists’ research suggests these negative stereotypes are unfounded and that the teen years are a time opportunity and growth as well as risk. Eva Telzer, PhD, explains why teens take more risks and why that risk-taking is sometimes beneficial, why parents have more influence than they think, and how social media and other technology use may be affecting teens’ behavior and development.

David L. Kirp NJTV News

The announcement that the state will take over Camden’s public schools turned attention to one of the most troubled school districts in the nation. University of California professor David Kirp points to Union City as one of the unsung success stories in public education.

Scott Pelley, CBS 60 Minutes

The surest way to narrow the wealth gap is to earn a college degree. Now major universities like Princeton are working to lower the price of admission through a new kind of affirmative action, not based on race, but on low-income status.

Have you ever misplaced something you were just holding? Completely blanked on a famous actor's name? Walked into a room and immediately forgot why? Neuroscientist Lisa Genova digs into two types of memory failures we regularly experience -- and reassures us that forgetting is totally normal. Stay tuned for a conversation with TED science curator David Biello, where Genova describes the difference between common moments of forgetting and possible signs of Alzheimer's, debunks a widespread myth about brain capacity and shares what you can do to keep your brain healthy and your memory sharp. 

Jonathan Haidt Hauenstein Center Talk

Why can’t our political leaders work together as threats loom and problems mount? Why do people so readily assume the worst about the motives of their fellow citizens? In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding.

Ted Talk

Anxiety is a normal part of life, so why are we so afraid of it? Psychologist Lisa Damour breaks down how to recognize when anxiety is helpful and when it's harmful, offering simple solutions for calming yourself and taking back control when you feel it slipping away. 

Frans de Waal

“I am not sure that religion is at the root of morality because I personally think that morality existed before we had religions … all human societies have a form of religion so what does religion contribute to human society – that’s the question.”

RSA

Evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar discusses the cognitive and social underpinnings of human evolution.

Dr. Kushner examines the limbic system, a complex network of structures that play a crucial role in regulating emotions, memory, and drives.

Dr. Kushner examines the limbic system, a complex network of structures that play a crucial role in regulating emotions, memory, and drives.

New Thinking Allowed

Sally Ornstein describes the capacities of the brain’s right hemisphere for experiences of transcendence and wholeness as well as the stages in humanity’s religious evolution leading up to the integration of science and spirituality.

Philip Zimbardo knows how easy it is for nice people to turn bad. In this talk, he shares insights and graphic unseen photos from the Abu Ghraib trials. Then he talks about the flip side: how easy it is to be a hero, and how we can rise to the challenge.

Matthew Lieberman, Ph.D., TEDx

Neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman explains that through his studies he’s learned that our kryptonite is ignoring the importance of our social superpowers and by building on our social intuition, we can make ourselves smarter, happier, and more productive.

BBC Radio 4

Is sacrificing one life to save the lives of many others the best possible outcome? Do you draw conclusions from how things are to think about how things should be? There might be a gap in your reasoning.

The School of Life

Many of humanity’s greatest problems stem not from a shortfall of technical or financial intelligence, but what we term emotional intelligence. It is through the acquisition of Emotional Intelligence that we stand to become better lovers, workers, friends and citizens.