The BEST episodes of TED Talks season 2016

#1 - Travis Kalanick: Uber's Plan To Get More People Into Fewer Cars

Season 2016 - Episode 44 - Aired 3/4/2016

Uber didn't start out with grand ambitions to cut congestion and pollution. But as the company took off, co-founder Travis Kalanick wondered if there was a way to get people using Uber along the same routes to share rides, reducing costs and carbon footprint along the way. The result: uberPOOL, the company's carpooling service, which in its first eight months took 7.9 million miles off the roads and 1,400 metric tons of carbon dioxide out of the air in Los Angeles. Now, Kalanick says carpooling could work for commuters in the suburbs, too. 'With the technology in our pockets today, and a little smart regulation,' he says, 'we can turn every car into a shared car, and we can reclaim our cities starting today.'

#2 - Thomas Peschak: Dive into an ocean photographer's world

Season 2016 - Episode 40 - Aired 2/29/2016

Somersaulting manta rays, dashing dolphins, swarming schools of fish and munching sharks inhabit a world beneath the ocean's surface that few get a chance to see. Conservation photographer Thomas Peschak visits incredible seascapes around the world, and his photos reveal these hidden ecosystems. 'You can't love something and become a champion for it if you don't know it exists,' he says. Join Peschak in a new, immersive TED Talk format as he shares his stunning work and his dream for a future of respectful coexistence with the ocean.

#3 - Franz Freudenthal: A new way to heal hearts without surgery

Season 2016 - Episode 169 - Aired 9/9/2016

At the intersection of medical invention and indigenous culture, pediatric cardiologist Franz Freudenthal mends holes in the hearts of children across the world, using a device born from traditional Bolivian loom weaving. "The most complex problems in our time," he says, "can be solved with simple techniques, if we are able to dream."

#4 - Christopher Bell: Bring on the female superheroes!

Season 2016 - Episode 162 - Aired 8/30/2016

Why is it so hard to find female superhero merchandise? In this passionate, sparkling talk, media studies scholar (and father of a Star Wars-obsessed daughter) Christopher Bell addresses the alarming lack of female superheroes in the toys and products marketed to kids — and what it means for how we teach them about the world.

#5 - Olivier Scalabre: The next manufacturing revolution is here

Season 2016 - Episode 156 - Aired 8/22/2016

Economic growth has been slowing for the past 50 years, but relief might come from an unexpected place — a new form of manufacturing that is neither what you thought it was nor where you thought it was. Industrial systems thinker Olivier Scalabre details how a fourth manufacturing revolution will produce a macroeconomic shift and boost employment, productivity and growth.

#6 - Danielle Feinberg: The Magic Ingredient That Brings Pixar Movies To Life

Season 2016 - Episode 68 - Aired 4/6/2016

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. This talk comes from the PBS special 'TED Talks: Science & Wonder.'

#7 - Tshering Tobgay: This Country Isn't Just Carbon Neutral - It's Carbon Negative

Season 2016 - Episode 49 - Aired 3/11/2016

Deep in the Himalayas, on the border between China and India, lies the Kingdom of Bhutan, which has pledged to remain carbon neutral for all time. In this illuminating talk, Bhutan's Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay shares his country's mission to put happiness before economic growth and set a world standard for environmental preservation.

#8 - Tim Urban: Inside The Mind Of A Master Procrastinator

Season 2016 - Episode 52 - Aired 3/15/2016

Tim Urban knows that procrastination doesn't make sense, but he's never been able to shake his habit of waiting until the last minute to get things done. In this hilarious and insightful talk, Urban takes us on a journey through YouTube binges, Wikipedia rabbit holes and bouts of staring out the window - and encourages us to think harder about what we're really procrastinating on, before we run out of time.

#9 - Auke Ijspeert: A Robot That Runs And Swims Like A Salamander

Season 2016 - Episode 18 - Aired 1/28/2016

Roboticist Auke Ijspeert designs biorobots, machines modeled after real animals that are capable of handling complex terrain and would appear at home in the pages of a sci-fi novel. The process of creating these robots leads to better automata that can be used for fieldwork, service, and search and rescue. But these robots don't just mimic the natural world -- they help us understand our own biology better, unlocking previously unknown secrets of the spinal cord.

#10 - Raffaello D'Andrea: Meet the dazzling flying machines of the future

Season 2016 - Episode 34 - Aired 2/19/2016

When you hear the word "drone," you probably think of something either very useful or very scary. But could they have aesthetic value? Autonomous systems expert Raffaello D'Andrea develops flying machines, and his latest projects are pushing the boundaries of autonomous flight -- from a flying wing that can hover and recover from disturbance to an eight-propeller craft that's ambivalent to orientation ... to a swarm of tiny coordinated micro-quadcopters. Prepare to be dazzled by a dreamy, swirling array of flying machines as they dance like fireflies above the TED stage.

#11 - Caleb Harper: This computer will grow your food in the future

Season 2016 - Episode 46 - Aired 3/8/2016

What if we could grow delicious, nutrient-dense food, indoors anywhere in the world Caleb Harper, director of the Open Agriculture Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, wants to change the food system by connecting growers with technology. Get to know Harper's 'food computers' and catch a glimpse of what the future of farming might look like.

#12 - Joe Gebbia: How Airbnb Designs For Trust

Season 2016 - Episode 51 - Aired 3/14/2016

Joe Gebbia, the co-founder of Airbnb, bet his whole company on the belief that people can trust each other enough to stay in one another's homes. How did he overcome the stranger-danger bias Through good design. Now, 123 million hosted nights (and counting) later, Gebbia sets out his dream for a culture of sharing in which design helps foster community and connection instead of isolation and separation.

#13 - Suzanne Simard: How trees talk to each other

Season 2016 - Episode 145 - Aired 7/22/2016

#14 - Don Tapscott: How the blockchain is changing money and business

Season 2016 - Episode 159 - Aired 8/25/2016

What is the blockchain? If you don't know, you should; if you do, chances are you still need some clarification on how it actually works. Don Tapscott is here to help, demystifying this world-changing, trust-building technology which, he says, represents nothing less than the second generation of the internet and holds the potential to transform money, business, government and society.

#15 - Bettina Warburg: How the blockchain will radically transform the economy

Season 2016 - Episode 218 - Aired 11/15/2016

Say hello to the decentralized economy -- the blockchain is about to change everything. In this lucid explainer of the complex (and confusing) technology, Bettina Warburg describes how the blockchain will eliminate the need for centralized institutions like banks or governments to facilitate trade, evolving age-old models of commerce and finance into something far more interesting: a distributed, transparent, autonomous system for exchanging value.

#16 - James Veitch: This Is What Happens When You Reply To Spam Email

Season 2016 - Episode 5 - Aired 1/8/2016

Suspicious emails: unclaimed insurance bonds, diamond-encrusted safe deposit boxes, close friends marooned in a foreign country. They pop up in our inboxes, and standard procedure is to delete on sight. But what happens when you reply? Follow along as writer and comedian James Veitch narrates a hilarious, weeks-long exchange with a spammer who offered to cut him in on a hot deal.

#17 - Harry Cliff: Have We Reached The End Of Physics?

Season 2016 - Episode 1 - Aired 1/4/2016

Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does so much interesting stuff exist in the universe? Particle physicist Harry Cliff works on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and he has some potentially bad news for people who seek answers to these questions. Despite the best efforts of scientists (and the help of the biggest machine on the planet), we may never be able to explain all the weird features of nature. Is this the end of physics? Learn more in this fascinating talk about the latest research into the secret structure of the universe.

#18 - Celeste Headlee: 10 Ways To Have A Better Conversation

Season 2016 - Episode 31 - Aired 2/16/2016

When your job hinges on how well you talk to people, you learn a lot about how to have conversations -- and that most of us don't converse very well. Celeste Headlee has worked as a radio host for decades, and she knows the ingredients of a great conversation: Honesty, brevity, clarity and a healthy amount of listening. In this insightful talk, she shares 10 useful rules for having better conversations. "Go out, talk to people, listen to people," she says. "And, most importantly, be prepared to be amazed."

#19 - Linus Torvalds: The Mind Behind Linux

Season 2016 - Episode 71 - Aired 4/8/2016

Linus Torvalds transformed technology twice - first with the Linux kernel, which helps power the Internet, and again with Git, the source code management system used by developers worldwide. In a rare interview with TED Curator Chris Anderson, Torvalds discusses with remarkable openness the personality traits that prompted his unique philosophy of work, engineering and life. 'I am not a visionary, I'm an engineer,' Torvalds says. 'I'm perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and just staring at the clouds ... but I'm looking at the ground, and I want to fix the pothole that's right in front of me before I fall in.'

#20 - Sebastian Wernicke: How To Use Data To Make A Hit Tv Show

Season 2016 - Episode 2 - Aired 1/5/2016

Does collecting more data lead to better decision-making? Competitive, data-savvy companies like Amazon, Google and Netflix have learned that data analysis alone doesn't always produce optimum results. In this talk, data scientist Sebastian Wernicke breaks down what goes wrong when we make decisions based purely on data -- and suggests a brainier way to use it.

#21 - David Sedlak: 4 Ways We Can Avoid A Catastrophic Drought

Season 2016 - Episode 4 - Aired 1/7/2016

As the world's climate patterns continue to shift unpredictably, places where drinking water was once abundant may soon find reservoirs dry and groundwater aquifers depleted. In this talk, civil and environmental engineer David Sedlak shares four practical solutions to the ongoing urban water crisis. His goal: to shift our water supply towards new, local sources of water and create a system that is capable of withstanding any of the challenges climate change may throw at us in the coming years.

#22 - Latif Nasser: You Have No Idea Where Camels Really Come From

Season 2016 - Episode 58 - Aired 3/23/2016

Camels are so well adapted to the desert that it's hard to imagine them living anywhere else. But what if we have them pegged all wrong What if those big humps, feet and eyes were evolved for a different climate and a different time In this talk, join Radiolab's Latif Nasser as he tells the surprising story of how a very tiny, very strange fossil upended the way he sees camels, and the world. This talk comes from the upcoming PBS special TED Talks: Science & Wonder, which premieres March 30th at 10 p.m. ET.

#23 - Adam Grant: The Surprising Habits Of Original Thinkers

Season 2016 - Episode 65 - Aired 4/1/2016

How do creative people come up with great ideas? Organizational psychologist Adam Grant studies "originals": thinkers who dream up new ideas and take action to put them into the world. In this talk, learn three unexpected habits of originals — including embracing failure. "The greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they're the ones who try the most," Grant says. "You need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones."

#24 - Hugh Evans: What Does It Mean To Be A Citizen Of The World?

Season 2016 - Episode 72 - Aired 4/11/2016

Hugh Evans started a movement that mobilizes 'global citizens,' people who self-identify first and foremost not as members of a state, nation or tribe but as members of the human race. In this uplifting and personal talk, learn more about how this new understanding of our place in the world is galvanizing people to take action in the fights against extreme poverty, climate change, gender inequality and more. 'These are ultimately global issues,' Evans says, 'and they can only be solved by global citizens demanding global solutions from their leaders.'

#25 - Brian Little: Who Are You, Really? The Puzzle Of Personality

Season 2016 - Episode 125 - Aired 6/23/2016

What makes you, you Psychologists like to talk about our traits, or defined characteristics that make us who we are. But Brian Little is more interested in moments when we transcend those traits - sometimes because our culture demands it of us, and sometimes because we demand it of ourselves. Join Little as he dissects the surprising differences between introverts and extroverts and explains why your personality may be more malleable than you think.