Designer Suzanne Lee shares her experiments in growing a kombucha-based material that can be used like fabric or vegetable leather to make clothing.

The process is fascinating, the results are beautiful (though there's still one minor drawback ...) and the potential is simply stunning.

TED Fellow Suzanne Lee is a fashion designer turned biological conjurer, who gleefully plays with new materials and processes.

Fashion designer Suzanne Lee directs the BioCouture research project, which sprang from an idea in her book Fashioning the Future: Tomorrow’s Wardrobe, a seminal text on fashion and future technologies.

We think of space as a silent place. But physicist Janna Levin says the universe has a soundtrack -- a sonic composition that records some of the most dramatic events in outer space. (Black holes, for instance, bang on spacetime like a drum.)

An accessible and mind-expanding soundwalk through the universe.

Janna Levin is a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard, where she studies the early universe, chaos, and black holes.

She's the author of “How the Universe Got Its Spots" and the novel “A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines.”

Janna Levin is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University. Her scientific research concerns the early universe, chaos and black holes.

With never-before-seen video, primatologist Isabel Behncke Izquierdo (a TED Fellow) shows how bonobo ape society learns from constantly playing -- solo, with friends, even as a prelude to sex.

Indeed, play appears to be the bonobos' key to problem-solving and avoiding conflict. If it works for our close cousins, why not for us?

TED Fellow Isabel Behncke Izquierdo studies the social behavior (and play behavior in particular) of wild bonobos in DR Congo.

TED Fellow Isabel Behncke Izquierdo writes: I was born and raised in Chile, and was educated in animal behaviour and evolutionary anthropology in Cambridge and Oxford.

For my PhD work, I study the social behaviour (and play behaviour in particular) of wild bonobos in DR Congo.

At TEDxDubai, longtime English teacher Patricia Ryan asks a provocative question:

Is the world's focus on English preventing the spread of great ideas in other languages? (For instance: what if Einstein had to pass the TOEFL?)

It's a passionate defense of translating and sharing ideas.

Patricia Ryan has spent the past three-plus decades teaching English in Arabic countries -- where she has seen vast cultural (and linguistic) change.

UK-born language teacher Patricia Ryan has spent most of the past 40 years teaching English in the countries of the Arabian Gulf.

Activist Caroline Casey tells the story of her extraordinary life, starting with a revelation (no spoilers).

In a talk that challenges perceptions, Casey asks us all to move beyond the limits we may think we have.

First, Caroline Casey put Ireland on the accessibility map. Now she's changing the global social landscape for people with disabilities.

Caroline Casey has dedicated the past decade of her life to changing how global society views people with disabilities.

In 2000, she rode 1,000 kilometers across India on an elephant to raise funds for Sight Savers.

Then, as founding CEO of Kanchi in Dublin, she developed a set of best practices (based on ISO 9000 quality standards) for businesses, to help them see "disabled" workers as an asset as opposed to a liability.