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How sugar affects the brain - Nicole Avena
Understanding sugar's impact on your brain chemistry.
TED-Ed: How Stretching Actually Changes Your Muscles
An athlete is preparing for a game. They’ve put on their gear and done their warmup, and now it’s time for one more routine — stretching. Typically, athletes stretch before physical activity to avoid injuries like strains and tears. But does stretching actually prevent these issues? And if so, how long do the benefits of stretching last? Malachy McHugh explores the finer points of flexibility.
TED-Ed: What Can DNA Tests Tell Us About Our Ancestry?
Two sisters take the same DNA test. The results show that one sister is 10% French, the other 0%. Both sisters share the same two parents, and therefore the same set of ancestors. So how can one be 10% more French than the other? Tests like these rely on our DNA to answer questions about our ancestry, but DNA actually can’t tell us everything. Prosanta Chakrabarty explores the accuracy of DNA tests.
TED-Ed: Why Our Muscles Get Tired
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.
TED-Ed: How Do We Study Living Brains?
As far as we know, there’s only one thing in our solar system sophisticated enough to study itself: the human brain. But this self-investigation is challenging because a living brain is shielded by skull, swaddled in tissue, and made up of billions of tiny cells. How do we study living brains without harming their owners? Elizabeth Waters and John Borghi explain how EEGs, fMRIs, and PETs work.
TED-Ed: How CRISPR Lets You Edit DNA
From the smallest single-celled organism to the largest creatures on Earth, every living thing is defined by its genes. With recent advancements, scientists can change an organism’s fundamental features in record time using gene editing tools such as CRISPR. But where did this medical marvel come from and how does it work? Andrea M. Henle examines the science behind this new technology.
The science of skin color - Angela Koine Flynn
Discover the biology behind human skin color variation.
TED-Ed: How Do Your Kidneys Work?
After drinking a few glasses of water on a hot day, you might be struck with a sudden ... urge. Behind that feeling are two bean-shaped organs that work as fine-tuned internal sensors. Emma Bryce details how the incredible kidneys balance the amount of fluid in your body, detect waste in your blood, and know when to release the vitamins, minerals, and hormones you need to stay alive.
How do vaccines work? - Kelwalin Dhanasarnsombut
Understand how vaccines train your immune system.
Cell vs. virus: A battle for health - Shannon Stiles
Watch the epic battle between your cells and invading viruses.
TED-Ed: Why Is Biodiversity So Important?
Our planet’s diverse, thriving ecosystems may seem like permanent fixtures, but they’re actually vulnerable to collapse. Jungles can become deserts, and reefs can become lifeless rocks. What makes one ecosystem strong and another weak in the face of change? Kim Preshoff details why the answer, to a large extent, is biodiversity.
TED-Ed: How Do Your Hormones Work?
Over our lifetimes, our bodies undergo a series of extraordinary metamorphoses: we grow, experience puberty, and many of us reproduce. Behind the scenes, the endocrine system works constantly to orchestrate these changes. Emma Bryce explains how this system regulates everything from your sleep to the rhythm of your beating heart, exerting its influence over each and every one of your cells.
TED-Ed: Can You Solve the Frog Riddle?
You’re stranded in a rainforest, and you’ve eaten a poisonous mushroom. To save your life, you need an antidote excreted by a certain species of frog. Unfortunately, only the female frog produces the antidote. The male and female look identical, but the male frog has a distinctive croak. Derek Abbott shows how to use conditional probability to make sure you lick the right frog and get out alive.
TED-Ed: The Chinese Myth of the White Snake
The talented herbalist Xu Xian had just started his own medicine shop where he created remedies with the help of his wife, Bai Su Zhen. One day a monk named Fa Hai approached him, warning him that there was a demon in his house. The demon, he said, was Bai Su Zhen. Xu Xian laughed. How could his kind-hearted wife be a demon? Shunan Teng traces the tale of the immortal white snake.
TED-Ed: What Happens During a Heart Attack?
Approximately seven million people around the world die from heart attacks every year. And cardiovascular disease, which causes heart attacks and other problems like strokes, is the world’s leading killer. So what causes a heart attack? Krishna Sudhir examines the leading causes and treatments of this deadly disease.
TED-Ed: The Myth of Thor's Journey to the Land of Giants
Thor—son of Odin, god of thunder, and protector of mankind—struggled mightily against his greatest challenge yet: opening a bag of food. How had the mighty god fallen so far? Scott Mellor tells the myth of Thor's journey to Utgard.
TED-Ed: How Blood Pressure Works
If you lined up all the blood vessels in your body, they’d be 60 thousand miles long. And every day, they carry the equivalent of over two thousand gallons of blood to the body’s tissues. What effect does this pressure have on the walls of the blood vessels? Wilfred Manzano gives the facts on blood pressure.
TED-Ed: Can You Solve the Virus Riddle?
Your research team has found a prehistoric virus preserved in the permafrost and isolated it for study. After a late night working, you’re just closing up the lab when a sudden earthquake hits and breaks all the sample vials. Will you be able to destroy the virus before the vents open and unleash a deadly airborne plague? Lisa Winer shows how.
TED-Ed: What Does the Liver Do?
There’s a factory inside you that weighs about 1.4 kilograms and runs for 24 hours a day. It’s your liver: the heaviest organ in your body, which simultaneously acts as a storehouse, a manufacturing hub, and a processing plant. Emma Bryce gives a crash course on the liver and how it helps keep us alive.
Could we survive prolonged space travel? - Lisa Nip
The biological challenges of long-distance space exploration.