Used since the 1940s, 'forever chemicals' include thousands of different types of substances routinely integrated into industry and consumer products, yet research suggests they can accumulate in the body over time.

The final shots of the Civil War were fired in the Arctic over 2 months after the South's surrender.

The steak sandwich had been around since at least the 1800s, but in the early 1900s, a Philadelphia hot dog vendor topped it with cheese and used different bread to create the cheesesteak.

The Bauhaus school developed a sleek typography that intentionally contrasted Nazi propaganda.

Listen to audio clips from Hoover, a harbor seal named after its insatiable appetite, who learned to say English phrases such as 'hello there' and 'come over here.'

Scientists have created a cell from scratch—called a SpudCell—proof-of-concept work that a lab-made cell can feed, grow, and replicate like a natural cell.

The Star-Spangled Banner was the name of a massive flag at Fort McHenry that Francis Scott Key saw during the Battle of Baltimore.

See how fireworks are made and which metals are responsible for different colors.

The US national anthem borrows its melody from 'The Anacreon Song,' a bawdy British tavern song that was popular in the 19th century.

Congress actually voted to approve independence on July 2, 1776, leading many Founders to believe that would be the date Americans would one day celebrate.

Abraham Lincoln had to sneak into Washington in disguise for his 1861 inauguration after a detective uncovered a plot to assassinate him in Baltimore.

Watch five unforgettable World Cup moments from the last twenty years of World Cup soccer, including Cristiano Ronaldo's dominant performance against Spain and Zinedine Zidane's notorious headbutt.

A single 1803 Supreme Court case, Marbury v. Madison, gave courts the power to strike down acts of Congress.

Nathan's Hot Dog Eating Contest, a July 4th tradition, has been primarily dominated by Joey 'Jaws' Chestnut since 2007, and by Miki Sudo on the women's side since 2014.

The 1783 peace treaty with Britain formally ended the Revolutionary War and nearly doubled the size of the United States.

The 2004 blockbuster National Treasure takes some liberties with history—discover what the movie gets wrong and right about the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution.

The first newspaper to report the Declaration of Independence was a German-language Philadelphia publication, simply because it was the only one that published on July 5.

Ray Kroc proposed the idea of franchising McDonald's as a way to sell more of his Multimixers 7 years before buying the McDonald's brothers out of the company for $2.7M.

Healthcare fraud may cost the US more than $100B annually—see this dashboard tracking healthcare fraud cases nationwide.

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.

Semaglutides, which belong to a class of drugs called GLP-1s, are prescribed for weight loss in combination with diet and exercise because they trigger the release of the appetite-suppressing hormone incretin.

Explore how temperatures compare to historical averages in cities worldwide with this interactive global monitor.

A magnitude 25 earthquake would release enough energy to destroy the sun, while a particle of dust drifting onto a table would have a magnitude of about -15.

Three of America's first five presidents—Jefferson, Adams, and Monroe—died on July 4.

Simulations suggest that a paper airplane launched from the International Space Station would maintain its orientation and gradually descend for 3.5 days before chaotically tumbling down and burning up.

The highest inflation ever recorded in US history was estimated at 30% in 1778, just after the Revolutionary War.

In the early 1900s, Fourth of July celebrations were so dangerous that a reform movement emerged to make them safer.

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

From glands beneath their skin, hippos produce their own sunscreen in the form of a fluid containing hipposudoric and norhipposudoric acids, which absorb sunlight in the ultraviolet and visible range.

No institution wields more power in US finance than the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the US—but opinion polls indicate that most Americans don't know what it does.

Fruit fly sperm are gigantic—about 40 times larger than human sperm, according to scientific research published in June 2026.

Despite being multicellular and photosynthetic, organisms such as kelp and sea moss are macroalgae, not plants, because they lack specialized roots and stems to pump water.

The drink that became Coca-Cola was originally called 'Pemberton's French Wine Coca.'

The Wright Flyer was an engineering breakthrough, and modern aircraft still use the same principles of flight.

The lyrics to John Denver's 'Take Me Home, Country Roads' reference landmarks that are mostly in western Virginia rather than West Virginia.

Due to a local microclimate, a thunderstorm nicknamed Hector the Convector appears almost every day from September to March at around 3 pm off the northern coast of Australia.

Travel the 363-mile Erie Canal, the waterway that cut freight costs by 90% and opened the American frontier.

Flatulence gives us tiny status reports from our gut microbiome, with American adults typically passing gas more than 30 times daily.

Explore the history of American restaurants through an archive of menus dating back to the early 1800s.

Explore a map of Medieval Europe, which was a patchwork of hundreds of competing states.

Supertoxic rat poisons are wreaking havoc on unintended targets, including predator birds, mammals, amphibians, crustaceans, and insects.

Since World War II, formal declarations of war and peace treaties have become increasingly rare, replaced by cease-fires, authorizations of force, and "special military operations."

Pregnancy makes someone more attractive to the mosquito species that transmits malaria.

The separation of crude oil into petroleum products begins by boiling it in a distillation tower, where constituent hydrocarbons are separated into layers based on the temperatures at which they boil.

Watch a two-year time-lapse of a pinecone seed transforming into a pine tree.

Fort Knox was originally built to be a secure facility for the US Treasury's gold reserves back when the US still operated under the gold standard, a system in which a country's currency is pegged to, and can be converted into, a fixed amount of gold.

The Electoral College is the system the United States uses to elect its president, allocating 538 electors across the states rather than relying on a single national vote.

Digital coupon platform Groupon IPO'd in 2011 at a $17.8B market cap, but as of 2024 was worth just $103M—a 99.4% decrease.

Lincoln Logs, the popular children's toy, was designed by John Lloyd Wright, son of architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who was inspired by his father's foundation of Tokyo's Imperial Hotel.

The first proposed experiment in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) began with 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.