TED Health TED Audio Collective

What you experience through your senses — sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch — can impact how healthy you are and how long you live, says neurobiologist Christi Gendron. She explores how environmental cues like temperature, light and even just the sight of death have influenced the lifespan of fruit flies, suggesting your everyday perceptions may have direct repercussions on your ability to live a long, healthy life.

Here's a conundrum: the same aerosol pollutants that harm human health also help cool the climate, says atmospheric scientist Sarah J. Doherty. Is there a way to clean up the air without warming the planet? Exploring the unintended consequences of reducing air pollution, she makes the case for a better understanding of marine cloud brightening — or intentionally adding sea salt aerosols to clouds over the ocean, which could reflect sunlight back into space and potentially reduce global warming.

Countries around the world waste huge amounts of food every year: roughly a fifth of food items in the US are tossed because consumers aren't sure how to interpret expiration labels. But most groceries are still perfectly safe to eat past their expiration dates. If the dates on our food don't tell us that something's gone bad, what do they tell us? Carolyn Beans shares how to prevent food waste. This TED-Ed lesson was directed by Anton Bogaty, narrated by Alexandra Panzer and the music is by Salil Bhayani, cAMP Studio.

Organ transplants save lives, but they come with challenges: every minute a healthy donated organ is on ice increases risk. And even if things go perfectly, rejection of the organ is still possible. Cardiothoracic surgeon Abbas Ardehali introduces cutting-edge medical advances in machine perfusion — a portable platform that keeps organs alive outside of the body — that could help put time back on the patient's side.

"Everybody pees and poops — and we know that urine and stool contain a rich source of information on our health," says data detective Newsha Ghaeli. Exploring the growing field of wastewater epidemiology, she shows how studying sewage can (anonymously) reveal a lot about the collective well-being of our cities — leading to real-time quality-of-life improvements like tracking pandemics, updating social policies and much more.

On average, adults catch more than 150 colds throughout their lives. Even with similar symptoms, the cause could be different each time. Common colds are caused by at least 8 different families of virus, each of which can have its own subtypes. How can so many different viruses cause the same illness? And is a cure even possible? Explore the two main strategies we employ to fight viruses. This TED-Ed lesson was directed by Anton Bogaty, narrated by George Zaidan and the music is by Nikola Radivojevic.