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.

Streaming service Netflix's sound logo 'Tudum' was designed as a key sonic differentiator.

Humans may have as many as 100,000 to 150,000 individual hairs on our scalps, growing at a rate of roughly 1 centimeter per month.

Explore Lewis and Clark's 8,000-mile journey in Google Earth.

Play the role of a student as you try to navigate college and remain debt-free.

Lesser-known phobias include turophobia, or the fear of cheese, and nomophobia, the fear of being without your cell phone.

Explore the known asteroids, comets, and spacecraft involved in asteroid studies within our solar system with 'Eyes on Asteroids,' a 3D visualization from NASA.

Explore a collection of famous literary maps, including original images from 'Treasure Island,' 'The Swiss Family Robinson, ' and 'Walden.'

The Berlin Wall physically separated East and West Berlin for nearly three decades, preventing East Germans from fleeing to the West and earning the nickname 'the Iron Curtain.'

There are up to 100 trillion microbes in the gut, and maintaining the relative balance in this ecosystem is important for our health.

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.

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

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.

Researchers generally group gut bacteria into six different categories, with varying amounts of these microbes residing in different parts of the digestive tract.

Use this tool to calculate the dollar value of your parental mental load, from meal planning to coordinating after-school care, then see resources that help generate solutions.

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.

Explore the 2025 Uber Lost & Found Index to find out the weirdest items that passengers left behind in Ubers last year, from ten live lobsters to a mannequin head with human hair.

Hear 50 years of iconic hip-hop samples, the genre's foundational looped tracks.

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.

Explore the wineries of Napa Valley with an interactive map of its hundreds of wineries, vineyards, and tasting rooms.

Explore the history, structure, and species of Australia's Great Barrier Reef with this interactive journey narrated by Sir David Attenborough.

George Lucas used Joseph Campbell's 'hero's journey,' a narrative structure that encompasses the common characteristics of multiple cultures' mythologies, to revise 'Star Wars.'

See a 3D reconstruction of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital

On planets in systems with two stars, such as the fictional Tatooine from 'Star Wars,' observers would see overlapping rainbows and double rainbows.

The US has discontinued a variety of different currency denominations over the years—including a $100K bill.

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

Male pattern baldness accounts for more than 95% of hair loss in men and is characterized by thinning hair, hair loss, and a receding hairline.

Robert Smalls escaped slavery by piloting a stolen Confederate ship to freedom, then became an influential Black political leader during Reconstruction.

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

Watch a visualization of what it would look like to move along Earth's surface as fast as the International Space Station, or about 23 times the speed of sound.

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.'

One of the most famous portraits ever taken is 'Afghan Girl' (1984) by Steve McCurry, yet the subject Sharbat Gula went much of her life without being identified or benefitting from the image's success.

One of the most famous portraits ever taken is "Afghan Girl" by Steve McCurry. Sharbat Gula, the subject of the photo, was not credited until 2002 for her role in the famous National Geographic cover, and continued to live in poverty after the photo was taken.

The US jobs projected to shrink the fastest over the next decade include typists and word processors.

'Tulip mania,' the 1630s Dutch craze where rare bulbs were briefly traded like luxury assets, may have been the first financial bubble—and it still shapes markets today.

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

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.

The tallest tsunami in recorded history was 524 meters (1,720 feet) high—taller than the Empire State Building—and occurred in Lituya Bay, Alaska, in 1958 after an earthquake dislodged a rockface into the water.

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

Located on Ross Island in Antarctica, Mount Erebus is the southernmost active volcano on Earth and features a lava lake—one of eight known worldwide as of 2026—that erupts regularly.

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

Watch Bruce Springsteen's 1985 performance of Woody Guthrie's 'This Land Is Your Land,' which he calls 'the greatest song ever written about America.'