An image of a shark swimming on the freeway repeatedly fools viewers during natural disasters

Watch the first-ever footage of a ghost shark

In 2009, the pointy-nosed blue chimaera was filmed swimming in the deep sea. That same year, researchers first observed them off the coast of California and Hawaii, after they had previously been found only in the Southern Hemisphere.

The animatronic shark from Steven Spielberg's 'Jaws,' the first modern blockbuster, was a complex underwater apparatus called 'Bruce.'

Track individual sharks around the world in real time

OCEARCH provides essential data on shark populations and marine ecosystems to support broader conservation efforts. Foster your understanding of marine ecosystems by exploring different species and their movement.

'Jaws' creators regret making sharks the monsters

Both Peter Benchley, the author of the original 1974 novel, and Steven Spielberg, the director of the blockbuster film based on it, acknowledge that the film's popularity has led to the stigmatization of the mostly harmless creatures.

See an anamorphic illusion of a massive crashing wave in South Korea

An enormous aquarium with perpetually crashing waves has popped up amidst an urban landscape in South Korea, but don’t expect to hear the water sloshing around if you walk by. Designed by District, the elevated tank is actually a massive anamorphic illusion. The digital media company created the pub

Hurricane Helene dumped enough water to fill Lake Tahoe

Alongside a rainstorm that moved into the region ahead of it, the hurricane released an unprecedented 40 trillion gallons of rain on the southeastern US, causing catastrophic flooding and at least 100 deaths. Meteorologists suggest climate change is exacerbating the severity of such events.

A Canadian tourism campaign turns every whale sighting—including ones from decades ago—into a live, crowdsourced migration biography

Humpback flukes (or tails) are as individually distinct as fingerprints, which means a single photo is enough to match a whale to its full sighting history. Every upload adds a chapter (the database goes back to the 1970s) and the site uses AI to render that data as narrative, not just data.

Possible globster sighted on the Oregon coast.

A man riding an ATV on the Oregon coast comes across a “sea monster", which is actually likely a decaying carcass of shark or whale.

Check out hurricane history where you live

The NOAA's historical hurricane tracker lets you explore over 150 years of data to see where hurricanes traveled and made landfall. The tool lets you search by location, name, or year; create maps and tables; and read NOAA storm reports.

Double rainbow appears in New York City on 9/11 anniversary

On the evening of the 9/11 anniversary in 2023, a double rainbow appeared after a thunderstorm across Manhattan, providing inspiration 22 years after the terrorist attacks there. Peruse several amateur images taken of the phenomenon which were shared on social media, including shots from up high in condos overlooking Central Park and from across the Hudson River in New Jersey.

See a gallery of winning photos from the Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards for 2025

The overall winner was “Ghost Town Visitor," which depicts an extremely rare brown hyena visiting an abandoned mining building in Kolmanskop, Namibia, by South African photographer Wim van den Heever. Other amazing shots include "Orphan of the Road," showing a longhorn beetle observing large machinery, and "Survival Purse," featuring the egg case of a swell shark.

Explore and visualize AI-driven global flood forecasts in 'Flood Hub'

Google's tool provides water trends, real-time flood forecasts, local inundation maps, and flood alerts, using AI models and available data to help people and institutions take action up to 7 days before a flood.

Katy Perry's 2015 halftime show generated many memes in the age of social media

During Super Bowl XLIX, Katy Perry's halftime performance—especially the unscripted "Left Shark"—went viral, becoming one of the first Super Bowl shows to fully translate into memes across social media platforms.

Despite Hurricane Katrina, Mardi Gras moved forward in 2006

Although the city had been ravaged by the storm in August 2005 and many of its residents had still not returned by Carnival season in 2006, Mardi Gras celebrations still trudged on, with many krewes' floats and costumes satirizing the fallout from the disaster. Below is a picture by photographers Tyrone Turner and Susan Sterner of one attendee sporting a hazard fence dress.

A photo gallery of underwater shipwrecks

Tobias Friedrich is a German scuba diver specializing in underwater photography. Check out this stunning gallery of shipwrecks as well as other galleries on conservation, sharks, and more.

Pepsi uses augmented reality to prank people at a bus shelter

Commuters at a London bus stop have seen alien invasions, monsters from the sewers grabbing pedestrians and tigers running down the street as part of an elaborate advertising campaign.

The 'Miracle on the Hudson' showed heroism in the air and changed social media forever

On Jan. 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 lost both engines after hitting birds and was safely landed in the Hudson River. The event was a turning point for Twitter, as a photo and a tweet quickly spread—marking Twitter's rise as a real-time news source.

See February 2026's best science images, including raining iguanas.

Visualizing the consequence of data breaches

To get a sense of the grim state of data security today, take a look at this infographic from TruthFinder that explains why 2018 was the year of the data breach tsunami.

In 2015, a custom virus program was used to destroy and transform art images

At the Art Laboratory Berlin's "bOdy pandemOnium: Immersion into Noise" exhibit, Chicago-born artist Joseph Nechvatal explored viractualism—the interface between the biological and the technological—via a custom virus program that randomly altered images representing the human eye and rectum.

The art of 'undiscovering' phantom islands

Centuries of maps include islands and isles that appear to only exist on atlases. This article explores the discovery and "undiscovery" of such landscapes, which still persist despite modern technology. As recently as 2012, Google Maps showed an...

This real-time tracking of the hantavirus cruise ship outbreak in May 2026 offers a unique glimpse into the global reach of the outbreak and whether the virus sickened passengers and their communities around the world.

Understanding 'YouTube Face,' the platform's pervasive thumbnail style

It's an image that's rampant across the web's premier video platform: open mouths, astonished eyes. It looks cheesy and cheap, yet its practitioners are some of YouTube's most popular personalities. The Ringer's Nate Rogers digs into the history of the phenomenon to learn why it's had such staying power.

Hurricanes spin due to differences in air and ground speed as they move across Earth

The movement of an object across latitudes causes it to take a curved trajectory because its speed no longer matches that of the ground beneath it. This phenomenon, called the Coriolis effect, explains why hurricanes spin counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.

See images of the spring break scene of the '80s

Aerial photos of red tide off the Gulf Coast

The toxic algae grows naturally in warmer oceans in small amounts and is typically harmless. With extended warm periods and unusually-high additions of nutrients from run-off, the algae blooms extensively, posing health risks to wildlife and humans...

Explore the animals that populate the depths of the ocean, from fish and coral in the first few hundred feet, all the way down to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

See these 16 pieces of art evoking phobias of snakes, flying, spiders, and more. 

Hurricanes, which rely on air consistently spinning in the same direction, cannot cross the equator because air curves in opposite directions north and south of it.

What is a reply all email storm?

When 30,000 people receive an email, to which anyone can "reply all," a spontaneous chain reaction of many more messages can be sparked, producing what's known as an "email storm." This has happened at a large scale in several high-profile cases, most notably in Thomson Reuter's email database. Check out Know Your Meme's breakdown of this phenomenon and description of several major examples.

See the most iconic photos from four decades of LIFE magazine

See images of medical cases of firework injuries shared on this 'Instagram for doctors.' (Warning: Graphic content)

A 2019 Facebook event called on attendees to "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us," resulting in countless memes, the creation of a music festival, and eventually the arrests of those who did try to approach the area.

For centuries, Niagara Falls has been a magnet for daredevils seeking to conquer one of nature's most powerful wonders, with its 200-foot drop and water rushing at 32 feet per second with 280 tons of force.

Fish populations in the Great Barrier Reef have increased after installing waterproof speakers on the ocean floor that played recordings of sounds from healthy coral reefs.

The first image of a black hole was captured by creating an Earth-sized virtual observatory from a network of eight radio telescopes.

When you complete a CAPTCHA on a website to prove you are human, you may be unknowingly training algorithms for self-driving cars, whose systems require training data to help identify crosswalks, bicycles, and other outdoor objects.

Waves off the coast of Nazaré, Portugal, can reach over 100 feet and are caused by the area's deep underwater canyon geography

Hotels in Cannes, the glamorous city on the French Riviera, hire hawks to ward off seagulls during the city's famous film festival.

Discover the catastrophic consequences of a failure of the US electrical grid—something that is more likely than many Americans think.

The distributor behind 'Rocky Horror' pulled the film from its scheduled national release, believing it would be a failure, though it eventually amassed a dedicated fanbase through midnight showings, a trend that continues over 50 years later.

Tattoos remain visible on your skin thanks to immune cells called macrophages

'Shogun,' a 1980s TV series, helped popularize sushi in the US by stimulating an American interest in Japanese culture.

Elk Cloner, the first computer virus to spread in public, was written as a practical joke by Richard Skrenta, a Pittsburgh high school student.

In 2009, the nation was gripped by the story of a missing young boy who was believed to be floating over Colorado in a homemade balloon, until it was revealed that he was at home the whole time.

El Niño, Spanish for 'the boy,' was named after Jesus Christ because the phenomenon resembled the weather changes observed around Christmastime.

Watch contemporary footage covering the US-backed Shah of Iran fleeing the country in the face of the 1979 Iranian Revolution

The idea for the Federal Reserve was conceived in secret in 1910—with bankers donning duck hunt gear for disguise while traveling to a remote country club on Georgia's Jekyll Island

See how Budweiser's famous Clydesdales spend their days at Warm Springs Ranch, where roughly 70 to 80 of the beer brand's giant horses can be found at any given time.

Louisiana's 'Cancer Alley' is infamous for having some of the highest industrial pollution, toxic air emissions, and cancer risks in the US.