All hurricanes have a central eye, where no extreme weather occurs, surrounded by intense winds and thunderstorms.

View a breakdown of the elemental composition of the major celestial bodies in the solar system.

The Foucault pendulum is direct evidence that the Earth rotates, as the apparent change in the plane of its swing results from the ground beneath the pendulum rotating over several hours.

In a standard deck of 52 cards, shuffling produces one of approximately 8.07 × 10⁶⁷ potential card orders—a number about as large as the number of atoms in the Milky Way.

The QWERTY layout first appeared in the Sholes and Glidden typewriter, sold starting in 1874 by the E. Remington and Sons gun manufacturer, which was looking to diversify after the Civil War.

The world's largest deserts—areas that receive less than 10 inches of annual rainfall—are led by the Antarctic and Arctic regions.

Although many insects are colloquially referred to as bugs, insects are only considered true bugs if they possess a proboscis—a straw-like mouthpart that can pierce surfaces and suck up fluids.

Although consuming saltwater can dehydrate and kill organisms, some fish survive by using specialized gills that leach excess salt from their bodies back into the surrounding water.

View a dashboard of real-time data and forecasts of US nocturnal bird migration.

Listen to what a forest in the Jurassic Period may have sounded like with this reconstructed soundscape, which was created by analyzing the fossilized wings of 165 million-year-old insects.

If there were a swimming pool on the moon, where gravity is about one-sixth that of Earth, championship finswimmers could potentially launch themselves up to 5 meters (16 feet) in the air.

One of the first mechanical calculators—the Pascaline—was built in 1643 by French mathematician Blaise Pascal to help his father, who worked as a tax collector.

Chameleons change color by altering the spacing of nanocrystals under their skin, which changes what colors of light are absorbed and reflected.

Flamingos get their pink coloring from carotenoids—pigments of yellow, orange, and red—in their food, but they cannot take on other colorations because their bodies cannot process other pigments.

Thunderquakes—seismic waves created when lightning strikes the ground—have enabled scientists to image underground environments near Earth's surface by detecting vibrations along subterranean fiber-optic cables.

Known as bullet trains in English, the Shinkansen uses electric motors, aerodynamic design, and infrastructure that prioritizes straightaways to travel at speeds equivalent to commercial planes' takeoff velocity.

The British Antarctic Survey created a map of what Antarctica would look like if it lost all 27 million cubic kilometers (6.5 million cubic miles) of its ice—enough to fill almost 6,500 Grand Canyons.

Trick a large language model into revealing secret passwords over multiple rounds, each with increasing safeguards.

The underlying fabric of the universe—spacetime—changes shape in the presence of mass and energy, which affects measurements of space and time.

Explore a map of data centers worldwide, numbering over 12,250 as of August 2026, with over 4,500 in the US.

View an illustrated history of Microsoft Solitaire, first released as part of the Windows 3.0 operating system in 1990 to help users get familiar with using a mouse.

The Planck time, equal to 5.39 × 10⁻⁴³ seconds or less than a millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, is the smallest unit of time that could ever be theoretically measured.

The list of historic volcanic eruptions includes the 1883 blast from Krakatau, which killed more than 36,000 and was the first such event to be documented in real time, thanks to the telegraph.

Aimed at increasing user engagement, social media algorithms will intentionally show content in feeds that is misaligned with users' beliefs because such content is more likely to be commented on.

The average banana produces one positron—the antimatter counterpart to an electron—every 75 minutes as its trace amounts of radioactive potassium decay.

The movement of molten metal around Earth's inner core creates the planet's magnetic field, whose north and south poles do not align with the planet's geographic poles.

Rather than removable armor like snail shells, turtle shells are part of the organism's skeleton and consist of 50 to 60 fused bones that grow with the organism.

Released in 2024, the polarized image of Sagittarius A* shows that the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way exhibits powerful, spiraling magnetic fields.

The moon is slowly contracting as its interior cools, creating moonquakes and lobate scarps—cliffs that are steep on one side and gently sloping on the other—as the moon's surface buckles.

As of 2026, the rarest mineral on Earth may be kyawthuite, an orange gemstone whose only known specimen was found in Myanmar in 2010.

Although the term 'glacial pace' is associated with the slow movement of glaciers, during glacier surging, these massive bodies of ice can move over 60 meters (200 feet) a day.

Under certain conditions, very hot liquids can freeze more quickly than cooler ones—a phenomenon called the Mbemba effect, after the Tanzanian high school student who accidentally observed it.

Some theorists have suggested that dark matter consists of supersymmetric particles—massive, hypothetical versions of known particles, such as the sneutrino, which is the supersymmetric partner of the neutrino.

Unlike generative AI systems, such as chatbots that do not take follow-up actions after generating their output, agentic AI systems proactively take steps to achieve goals without continuous user input.

Invisible to direct observation, scientists determined the object at the center of the Milky Way—Sagittarius A*—was a supermassive black hole based on the orbits of fast-moving stars in the area.

View the Crab Nebula in different wavelengths of light to identify the structures surrounding the neutron star—a stellar remnant composed of tightly-packed neutrons.

Once cooled to temperatures just above 2 Kelvin, helium atoms exhibit a quantum property that removes internal friction, allowing the fluid to climb up walls.

Often considered the largest natural mirror on Earth, Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni is the world's largest salt flat—a desert formation covered in minerals.

The world's largest waterfall is in the ocean and is more than three times the height of Angel Falls, the largest waterfall on land.

On a cruise ship, the average person uses about 50 gallons of water a day, which is treated by bacteria and onboard filtration systems, then stored until the ship can legally discharge the wastewater.

If the temperature of water continuously decreases but it is not given room to expand, it will eventually contract and form exotic forms of ice that sink in liquid water.

Drum shields—barriers that drummers are often seen playing behind—help prevent drums from being picked up by other onstage microphones, thereby improving audio mix quality.

In 1962, the US detonated a nuclear weapon in space, which produced an electromagnetic pulse that disabled three low Earth orbit satellites and damaged electrical equipment in Hawaii.

Quarks are fundamental particles that come in six varieties and combine together to form larger, composite particles, such as the proton and the neutron.

Scientists can create movies of atomic and molecular phenomena using X-ray free-electron lasers, in which images are produced by matter being struck by high-intensity light created by accelerating electrons.

While nearly all fish are cold-blooded—their body temperatures match their surroundings—the opah, or moonfish, is fully warm-blooded, with a body temperature about 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than its environment.

The world's first chatbot, ELIZA, was developed in the 1960s as a technical demonstration exploring human-computer communication, with one of its scripts allowing it to emulate a psychotherapist.

Light takes approximately eight minutes to travel from the sun's surface to Earth, but it takes thousands of years to reach the star's surface from its core—a distance more than 200 times shorter.

Computer systems create artificial voices by stitching together phonemes—individual sounds that make up speech, such as 't,' 'long a,' and 'k' to say 'take.'

Objects can be made invisible through refraction, in which light from behind an object is bent around it, making only the background visible.