Nathan Wolfe, founder of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative, in National Geographic.

Samuel Arbesman’s fascinating new book, The Half-Life of Facts, is brought to life in this quirky animated short.

“I think there’s a sense that many of us have that the great age of exploration on Earth is over,” says virus hunter Nathan Wolfe. That sense, as he explains in this keynote, is mistaken—there still might be entire forms of microscopic life that have not yet been found.

In her recent TIME Magazine profile, astrophysicist and TED Fellow Lucianne Walcowicz explains how her and her team are looking for alien communication in the flickering of stars.

Samuel Arbesman, author of The Half-Life of Facts, from The Economist.

New Lavin speaker and TED Senior Fellow Jessica Green is showing us the amazing and important role microbes play in our everyday lives—in our bodies, our forests, and even our buildings—and she’s doing it in visually stunning ways.

Nina Tandon, a tissue engineer and TED Fellow, explains how we’re moving towards the “Body 3.0”—where we can grow bones and organs from our own DNA.

TED Fellow Hakeem Oluseyi has dedicated his life to teaching science to those in underserved communities and developing countries. From his formative years in some of the poorest ghettos in the American south, to his current position as a member of a Nobel Prize-winning team of scientists at Stanford, Oluseyi is a testament to the transformative power of knowledge, and a master at turning complex ideas into simple explanations. In this video, he likens the evidence that supports the Big Bang to the stretching of a rubber band.

TED Fellow and Astrophysicist Lucianne Walkowicz studies the faces of stars to learn the inner workings of their hearts. In this fascinating TED talk, she shares some of the astounding findings of NASA’s Kepler mission, which searches for new planetary systems in far-off space. “In just over two years of operations, we’ve found over 1,200 potential new planetary systems around other stars,” she says. “To give you some perspective, in the previous two decades of searching, we had only known about 400, prior to Kepler.”

Here’s science speaker Samuel Arbesman, in an interview at the Kauffman Foundation, on why education doesn’t stop when you graduate. As he argues in his latest book, The Half-Life of Facts, the rapid increases in scientific discovery and technological innovation has turned facts from widely believed truths into temporary stances that are constantly changing. “You shouldn’t view your education as a done deal,” says Arbesman, offering that education is about, “being given the tools to think and understand the world” and not a one-time, definitive training ground.