TED Talks

In this excerpt from the PBS special TED Talks: Science and Wonder, Juan Enriquez, leading authority in genomic code and author of Evolving Ourselves, explains the difference between natural and unnatural selection with an assist from man’s best friend.

In early 2015, Dr. Oliver Sacks learned that his ocular melanoma had metastasized to his liver. Shot in the last months of his life, this film illuminates Sacks’s searching curiosity, extraordinary powers of observation, compassion, and ability to find joy and beauty in science and in the world around him.

So you’re sitting just off of Times Square in midtown Manhattan in 2015 – but what are you sitting on top of? Zooming back a million years to look at the evolution of this little patch of land, this film offers an awe-inspiring view of the speed and ferocity with which humans have utterly transformed the globe.

Designer and inventor Joris Laarman is on the brink of a technological revolution that he believes will change how we build and what our world looks like. Bridge to the Future follows Joris and his team as they prepare to push the limits of robotics, engineering, and 3D printing in order to print a giant, steel bridge in Amsterdam.

Bill Nye and the Planetary Society are engineering and launching LightSail, a citizen-funded spacecraft that sails on photons which will gather information from space and send it back to Earth. When completed, this launch will fulfill a journey that Carl Sagan first attempted to accomplish nearly five decades ago.

Danielle Feinberg, Pixar's director of photography, creates stories with soul and wonder using math, science and code. Go behind the scenes of Finding Nemo, Toy Story, Brave, WALL-E and more, and discover how Pixar interweaves art and science to create fantastic worlds where the things you imagine can become real.

Cancer is a very clever, adaptable disease. To defeat it, says medical researcher and educator Paula Hammond, we need a new and powerful mode of attack. With her colleagues at MIT, Hammond engineered a nanoparticle one-hundredth the size of a human hair that can treat the most aggressive, drug-resistant cancers.

Danielle Feinberg, Pixar's director of photography, creates stories with soul and wonder using math, science and code. Go behind the scenes of Finding Nemo, Toy Story, Brave, WALL-E and more, and discover how Pixar interweaves art and science to create fantastic worlds where the things you imagine can become real.

TED Talks: Science and Wonder asks, how do we make sense of the universe around us, as some of the brightest scientific and artistic minds take us on a journey to answer the riddles of the universe that keep scientists awake at night.

In this excerpt from the PBS special TED Talks: Science and Wonder, Pixar's Director of Photography and Lighting Danielle Feinberg looks at the science and physics of light as seen in the wonderful, award-winning animated feature films of Pixar. Here she focuses on a scene from Finding Nemo to exemplify the ways her team created natural light under water.

In this excerpt from the PBS special TED Talks: Science and Wonder, Radiolab's Latif Nasser takes us across the frozen Arctic with a paleobiologist who makes a rather remarkable discovery. Finding 3.5 million year old bones preserved in the ice, the scientist uses a new process called "collagen fingerprinting" to determine the ancient find was a long way from its current home.