On the heels of the Roman Empire came the Byzantine Empire to the east, based in Constantinople. The arts and sciences continued to flourished there long after vandals had ransacked ancient Rome.
The fall of Constantinople, in 1453, led many of its artists and scientists to venture westward. They contributed greatly to the new Renaissance era that ended the Middle Ages. Here’s more from TED-Ed.
Research in social psychology suggests that we’re quick to form lasting impressions of others based on their behavior. That being said, research also tells us that we can change our minds based on new information. The following Ted-Ed video shares the social psychology of first impressions, as put forth by University of Delaware assistant professor of psychology Peter Mende-Siedlecki, and why they may indicate that, deep down, people are basically good.
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Contrary to popular belief, gold is not of this world. Instead of arising from our planet’s rocky crust, it was actually cooked up in space and is present on Earth because of cataclysmic stellar explosions called supernovae. In this entertaining episode of Ted-Ed, narrator Addison Anderson outlines the incredible journey of gold from space to Earth as put forth by scientist David Lunney.
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We breathe in about 17,000 times a day, but it’s a dynamic process we rarely think about. It’s a coordinated effort by our vital organs working together to sustain life by delivering oxygen to tissues about the body. Delivering the oxygen through our system in an orderly manner is a complicated system made possible by our heart, the powerhouse that gets oxygen where it needs to go. Narrator Addison Anderson details the process in this episode of Ted-Ed.
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One of history’s biggest unsolved mysteries is a lone copy of a 240-page tome that sits buried in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The Voynich Manuscript, carbon dated to 1420, has baffled cryptologists for centuries because no one can figure out what it says. Experts say the tome has all the characteristics of a real language, only one no one has seen before. Is it a hoax or a book of secrets? Learn more from Ted-Ed.
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While just about everyone from governments to military leaders are employing futurists to forecast what lies ahead, science fiction once–and still does in many cases–ruled the roost. Sci-Fi emerged as a new form of literature during the Industrial Revolution, and the era’s futurists, such as H.G. Wells, Jules Verne and other prolific writers, explored fantastic scenarios depicting new frontiers of human endeavor. Storytellers continued to share their visions of the future into the 20th and 21st centuries, correctly predicting many aspects of the world we inhabit many decades later. Learn more from Ted-Ed.
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The Atlantic slave trade, which forcibly brought more than 10 million African Americans to our shores, stands out for its global scale and lasting legacies. Occurring from the late 15th to the mid-19th centuries, the slave trade spanned three continents and the impact it left not only affected the slaves and their descendants, but also the economies and histories of large parts of the world. Ted-Ed discusses the massive impact of this historical injustice that you will not find in textbooks.
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Once upon a time the value of money was linked to how much gold or silver the U.S. had squirreled away. Today, the determining factor is how much of it is in circulation. In this edition of TED-Ed, Doug Levinson explains who makes the decision about how much money to print and how it affects the economy at large.
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An environmental mystery that has developed over the past decade has scientists completely baffled. During that span, domesticated honeybees have been vanishing at an alarming and unprecedented rate. In the following clip, courtesy of TED-Ed, narrator Derek Gebhart says the phenomenon is now known as Colony Collapse Disorder.
“The most frightening thing about this mystery isn’t that we’ll have to go back to using regular sugar in our tea,” Gebhart says. “We farm bees for their honey, but they also pollinate our crops on an industrial scale, generating over a third of America’s food production this way.”
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