Human Interest

The household pets most likely to survive and thrive in the wild are cats, snakes, and goldfish.

Former First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln held seances in the Red Room of the White House following the death of her son Willie.

Explore small gestures and moments that made strangers happy with this interactive bird-catching site.

Discover your fortune with a virtual art-themed Tarot deck.

Play Krillion, a daily game that rewards rare answers to seven prompts.

People used to visit graveyards as a place to relax outdoors until the late 19th century, when more public parks became available for people to gather instead.

See an architect's ranking of the best bridges in the world, based on his belief that crossings should offer enjoyment and community interaction.

Explore an interactive map showing what makes people happy, based on 10,000 responses from people all around the world.

See how mule deer, ospreys, and blue whales complete some of the most remarkable migrations on Earth—and the human-made obstacles increasingly standing in their way.

Coffee was put on trial in Mecca in 1511, and its eventual acceptance helped coffee spread beyond religious use and into the world's first public coffeehouses, which ultimately gave birth to the London Stock Exchange.

Often viewed as pests, black-tailed prairie dogs play a key role in North American grassland ecosystems.

See 2026's Ocean Photographer of the Year winners.

Read about a fictionalized life randomly chosen from human history.

Five factors that can influence your likability include asking questions, being present, vulnerability, similarity, and people's preconceived notions.

Track individual sharks around the world in real time.

In the 1980s, a shipping container carrying thousands of plastic Garfield telephones fell into the sea off France's Breton coast, inspiring an enduring tradition of locals hunting for parts.

Art theft is the third-largest source of criminal revenues worldwide.

In 2018, BBC crews filming emperor penguins decided to break their 'no interference' rule and save the trapped animals from freezing with their young.

Explore a database of more than 220,000 shipwrecks, the largest compilation to date.

Explore a photo gallery of underwater shipwrecks taken by Tobias Friedrich, a German scuba diver specializing in underwater photography.

At the Brandenburg Gate in 1987, President Ronald Reagan famously challenged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall," casting the Berlin Wall as a symbol of the Communist era and Germany's Cold War division.

Explore how the most commonly used words in the English language have changed from the 1950s to 2023.

In the early 20th century, 'baby cages' were popular among parents who believed that putting their children in the cold would build their immunity to minor illnesses.

While planning a vacation, it can be advantageous to avoid the peak tourism season at your destination.

In 1969, a group of reporters wrote an intentionally bad and salacious novel under a pen name to prove that sex sells more than quality. It sold 20,000 copies within a few months and spent 13 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list.

In 1842, a "mermaid" from Fiji was put on display at a museum, drawing large crowds and fooling many. It was later discovered that the creature was created by sewing the upper body of a monkey to the lower body of a fish.

Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase took pictures of his wife Yoko leaving for work every morning from his fourth-floor window in a series called From Window. Not long after, Yoko filed for divorce.

Watch a breakdown of the canine family tree that explains how foxes and wolves are related to our beloved household pets, like poodles and dachshunds

Find new favorite novelists with this literature map.

Remove the tyranny of choice and quickly generate a movie suggestion with this site.

Type the name of an artist you like and find your new favorite band with this music map of taste.

Watch Maradona's controversial 'Hand of God' goal against England.

Watch ESPN's compilation of iconic moments in sports from 2000 to 2009 in their 'Images of the Decade' special.

Researchers have found that various monkeys have pet-like relationships with other species.

You may be better at spotting a lie when listening to a speaker's voice inflections rather than watching for facial and body cues.

Relax to a livestream of brown bears chilling in Katmai National Park.

Give your memories a place to live and explore the personal stories left by strangers, tied to specific locations, in this interactive map of the world.

Make a popular no-churn watermelon ice cream, using just watermelon and milk.

See a collection of mind-bending architecture around the world, including a teapot gas station, a duck home, and a picnic basket building.

See nine celebrities who adopted animals they met on set.

Explore (and debunk) the world's most contagious misconceptions—from the 5-second rule to sugar rushes—on this interactive site. Click on each misconception for further evidence.

Test your historical knowledge with this daily game that shows you 10 historical artifacts and asks you to guess their time period and place of origin.

Play "I Spy" using nearly 40,000 Wikipedia objects.

Photographer Mathieu Stern found a little girl's 120-year-old time capsule containing two glass plate negatives in his family home, and developed the photos, unveiling images of the child's pets.

Peek into the love lives of thousands of strangers whom Stanford University researchers have been tracking since 2017 on this interactive page.

The giant African harvester ant is rising in popularity as a pet and fueling illegal global trade, with creatures sometimes costing as much as $220.

The first proposed experiment in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) began with the mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss, who is credited with the idea of drawing a right triangle and three squares on Earth's surface to signal to aliens using the language of mathematics.

Humans tend to imagine aliens as humanlike, but that could be unlikely given that different environments, nutrients, and resources shape how creatures form and evolve.

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy set forth an argument for the effort to land humans on the moon’s surface, casting the Apollo mission in terms of historic human ambitions.

Author David Foster Wallace's 'This Is Water' commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005 provides guidance for adulthood.