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In 1988, the Food and Drug Administration decided not to require homeopathic remedies to go through the same drug-approval process as standard medical treatments. Now the FDA is revisiting that decision. It will hold two days of hearings this week to decide if homeopathic remedies should have to be proven safe and effective.

There's no getting around the strangeness of a map that shows the most distinctive cause of death in each of our 50 states and the District of Columbia. In Texas, it's tuberculosis. In Maine, it's the flu. And in Nevada, it's the ominous "legal intervention." But what does it mean to label a cause of death distinctive?

They're also obsessed with illusions because they can teach us about the mundane, nonillusory percepts that help us navigate everyday life so effectively.

Vision scientists are obsessed with illusions. This isn't because illusions shatter the sense that we have direct access to the physical properties of the external world. And it isn't because illusions give us the feeling — itself a deception — that for one brief moment we've transcended appearance to understand things as they truly are. At least, these aren't the only reasons vision scientists are obsessed with illusions. They're also obsessed with illusions because they can teach us about the mundane, nonillusory percepts that help us navigate everyday life so effectively.

They're also obsessed with illusions because they can teach us about the mundane, nonillusory percepts that help us navigate everyday life so effectively.

The world has grown far too familiar with genocide; as mass killings have claimed countless lives, the word has become ingrained into our vocabularies. But the term didn't exist until 1943, when Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined it — pairing the Greek "genos," meaning race or family, with the Latin "-cidere," for killing. Lemkin, who witnessed the massacres of the early 20th century, spent his life campaigning to make the world acknowledge and prosecute the crime. A new documentary, Watchers of the Sky, tells his story. Once he'd established the word, Lemkin worked persistently in the then-newly-formed United Nations, hounding delegates to discuss his new word and acknowledge the issue.

Memory Games Memory is malleable, dynamic and elusive. In this hour, TED speakers discuss how a nimble memory can improve your life, and how a frail one might ruin someone else's.

Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman goes through a series of examples of things we might remember, from vacations to colonoscopies. He explains how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently.

Could studying ants reveal clues to reducing highway traffic jams? Physicist Apoorva Nagar at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology thinks the answer is yes. Nagar says he got interested in the topic when he came across a study by German and Indian researchers showing that ants running along a path were able to maintain a steady speed even when there were a large number of ants on the path. Nagar says there are three main reasons ants don't jam up. Number one, ants don't have egos. They don't show off by zooming past people. "The second thing is, they do not mind a few accidents, or collisions," say Nagar. So unless there's a serious pileup, they just keep going.

The third reason, he says, is that ants seem to get more disciplined when paths get crowded, running in straighter lines, and varying their speed less. They're less likely to make unexpected moves in this sort of heavy traffic. It's the kind of steady control you see when a computer is controlling a car rather than a human. There's less variability unless it's absolutely called for. Nagar felt this kind of behavior could be explained by something called the Langevin equation, an equation physicists use when describing the movement of liquids, or how individual atoms behave in a lattice.

It was supposed to be a celebratory occasion, a high-profile performance of a piece given life by the orchestra that commissioned it — a young composer's music played by other young musicians. Instead, the performance scheduled for Sunday of Jonas Tarm's music at Carnegie Hall by the highly regarded New York Youth Symphony (NYYS) has been canceled after it came to the attention of the ensemble's administration that the piece contains a quotation from the Nazi "Horst Wessel Lied." Born in Estonia, Tarm is a 21-year-old composer studying at the New England Conservatory in Boston. In 2014, he won the "First Music" prize from the NYYS, which resulted in the commission of a piece to be played by the orchestra at Carnegie Hall. Within the 9-minute piece called, in Ukrainian, Marsh u Nebuttya (March to Oblivion), Tarm says he used two musical quotes, each about 45 seconds long. The first is the anthem of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the second is the Nazi anthem, the "Horst Wessel" song. Tarm maintains that a piece of music should not necessitate further verbal explication. As such, he did not volunteer to tell the NYYS he was making those musical quotations within his piece, nor did he provide any background or context about his artistic intentions to the orchestra.

But some of his most interesting work has to do with power dynamics. He says that by analyzing language you can easily tell who among two people has power in a relationship, and their relative social status.

We use "I" more when we talk to someone with power because we're more self-conscious. We are focused on ourselves — how we're coming across — and our language reflects that.

You can't, he believes, change who you are by changing your language; you can only change your language by changing who you are