OCW
Why Iceland's lava is so hard to control
In December 2023, Icelandic citizens experienced their worst nightmare: a volcanic fissure opened and began spewing lava fountains 100 meters tall. While the molten rock narrowly avoided a small town, Iceland wasn’t willing to leave anyone's fate to chance again and began preparing for future..
TED
A cheat sheet for accelerating clean energy
After the Fukushima disaster shut down Japan's nuclear reactors, the coal industry rushed in to fill the energy gap. As climate advocate Kimiko Hirata watched dozens of new coal plant proposals quietly surface across the country — each one locking in decades of future emissions — she resolv..
TED
How do snakes swallow animals so much bigger than they are?
Since slithering onto the scene some 150 million years ago, evolving length and limbless-ness out of their ancestral lizard forms, snakes have diversified rapidly. Their noodly bodies and flexible heads granted them access to novel places and prey. And today, there are nearly 4,000 snake species, sp..
TED
The nurse who can smell Parkinson’s
What does Parkinson's smell like? Ask nurse Joy Milne. Born with a hypersensitive nose, she spent a lifetime learning to recognize diseases through their scents. When she smelled Parkinson's on her husband years before his diagnosis, she decided to put her gift to the test. Today, her extr..
TED
The climate solutions creating new jobs
Africa holds more than 60 percent of the world’s solar potential … yet it draws a fraction of global clean-energy investment. Social entrepreneur James Irungu Mwangi sees a continent brimming with untapped opportunity. From biochar producers in rural Kenya to young women training as solar techni..
TED
How to make transportation quieter, cleaner and cheaper
When Doreen Orishaba helped build Africa’s first electric car in 2011, skeptics dismissed it as a “toy for the Western world.” Now she’s running dozens of electric buses across Kenya and Rwanda, moving thousands of passengers to work every day on zero-exhaust vehicles powered by near-silent ..
TED
