View the most expensive materials on Earth, led by those forged in particle accelerators

While atoms are normally made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, exotic ones have been built with antimatter—alternate versions of normal matter that live for fractions of a second and are about a billion times as rare.

View the periodic table of radioactive elements, and a list of each's most stable isotopes

Technetium is the lightest artificial radioactive element, which is produced primarily as a byproduct of nuclear fission. Several unstable isotopes are commercially available to medical professionals and scientists, despite their radioactivity risks.

While atoms are normally made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, exotic ones have been built with antimatter—alternate versions of normal matter that live for fractions of a second and are about a billion times as rare.

Scientists turn alchemists, transforming transform lead into gold

Fulfilling alchemists' dreams, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) transmute lead into gold. While the 86 billion gold nuclei produced were short-lived, the experiment sheds light on how electromagnetic fields can play a critical role in nuclear transmutation.

View the five most expensive metals used to make batteries

Before 2021, when lithium carbonate became the most expensive metal for use in electric vehicle cathodes, cobalt was the most costly battery metal. Of the top five, copper is the only metal not used in cathodes, arguably the most important part of the battery, which determines performance, longevity, and range.

The Manhattan Project was one of the most expensive undertakings of World War II

Building the first atomic weapons required hundreds of thousands of workers, vast secret facilities, and enormous spending. This 1998 study details the full cost of the Manhattan Project and compares it to other major US wartime expenditures.

Earth's core is leaking precious metals, including gold

Earth's core, containing 99.999% of all known gold, is leaking trace amounts of precious metals into the mantle. Advanced isotopic methods have detected this leakage at volcanoes in Hawai'i, providing new insights into the movement of material beneath Earth's surface.

More than 97% of the world's particle accelerators are used for commercial purposes

Only a few hundred of the over 30,000 particle accelerators worldwide are used for research. Most are involved in medical imaging and treatment, food sterilization, semiconductor processing, cargo screening, and radioisotope production. They're also used to modify the properties of polymers.

How five of the world's most expensive salt and spices are made

Part of the charm of certain spices and salts is their exotic origin, hailing from difficult-to-access locales or hewn via special processes. That also explains why they can be so expensive. Dive into the businesses of producing and marketing five of the world's most expensive food additives with this engaging video.

The most expensive ad of all time was for Chanel No. 5 perfume and cost roughly $33M to produce in 2004—about $57M in today's dollars.

Why caviar is still so expensive, even though it's no longer rare

An ounce of caviar can cost more than $250, even though China has flooded the market with a surge in supply over the past decade. As it turns out, the perception of caviar as a luxury good rather than a true scarcity is part of what keeps it so expensive.

As of 2022, China has the largest reserve of rare earth elements

At 37.9% of estimated global reserves, China possesses twice the amount of REEs as Vietnam, the next closest nation. REEs, or lanthanides, are a set of 17 elements on the periodic table, which, alongside scandium and yttrium, share similar chemical properties that make them difficult to separate from within ores.

The value of a 400 oz gold bar hit $1M for the first time in 2024

On Aug. 16, 2024, the gold bar size often seen in movies hit $1M in value for the first time when the price of gold reached $2,500 per troy ounce. A data visualization shows what other gold bar sizes are worth and compares them to the size of an iPhone.

A unique art piece became the most expensive NFT when it sold for $92M

Non-fungible tokens sold for millions of dollars during their popularity peak from 2021 to 2022, with the top ten most expensive NFTs all costing upwards of $7M.

The incredibly advanced engineering of the B-2 Bomber

B-2 Bombers are the world's most expensive plane, coming in at a cost of $2B per aircraft. There are roughly 20 in the world, all in use by the United States Air Force. They are known for their single-wing profile, allowing for stealth and the ability to transport some of the world's largest bombs.

About 20% of asteroids are metal worlds similar to Earth's core

The biggest of these (that we know of) is 16 Psyche. Measuring 140 miles across, its iron and nickel content is potentially worth 10,000 quadrillion dollars. NASA’s mission to Psyche—reaching the asteroid in 2029—will study it to learn about its formation.

Why space resource extraction companies are racing to harvest lunar helium

Without a magnetic field to deflect it away, helium-3 from solar wind has accumulated on the lunar surface over billions of years in significant quantities. With a reported value of $20M per kilogram because of its potential use in clean nuclear fusion, harvesting of helium-3 may form the basis of a future lunar economy.

A breakdown of nuclear fusion and what is impeding this near-limitless clean-energy resource

While today's nuclear reactors rely on fission, which releases energy by splitting heavy atoms, nuclear fusion releases energy by combining atoms together to form more massive ones. Fusion involves overcoming repulsive forces between the centers, or nuclei, of atoms, and, as of 2026, overcoming this repulsion takes more energy than is produced.

Ranking the most expensive appliances on your electricity bill

Energy costs have gone up amid war and inflation. Here's a breakdown on the cheapest and most expensive appliances in your home to help you lower your bill.

What is the rarest color in nature?

Plants, animals, or minerals found in nature bear almost every color imaginable. There are two factors that influence what hues you see in the wild: physics and evolution. So, which colors are you least likely to see in the natural world? Victoria Hwang explores one of nature’s rarest spectacles.

Monaco is the world's most expensive real estate market

New York City was the world's second-most expensive real estate market, and Hong Kong was the third. A visual ranks the top 20 most expensive real estate markets in the world at the time.

Collisions between cosmic rays and atmospheric particles dwarf particle accelerators

According to Einstein's model of gravity, confining immense energy into a sufficiently small region would warp space-time enough to create a black hole. If accelerators actually did create black holes, then trillions more would be produced daily in the atmosphere, where collisions are millions of times more energetic.

Serbian donkey cheese is the most expensive in the world

Only one farm in the world produces pule, a cheese made from rare Balkan donkey milk that can cost up to $600 per pound. Pule is special for a number of reasons, including the unusual ingredients and the amount of labor required to produce it. Everything, including milking the donkeys, must be done by hand.

A cup of coffee on Earth contains about 100 proton masses worth of dark matter

The estimate is based on Earth's location within the Milky Way and the dark matter cloud it resides in. Because scientists do not know the nature of dark matter, the mass may be accounted for with any number of dark matter particles of varying mass.

The most expensive ad of all time was for Chanel No. 5 perfume

The video ad, starring actress Nicole Kidman, aired in 2004 and cost roughly $33M at the time (when accounting for inflation, that would be roughly $57M in 2026). You can watch the ad spot in full here.

The 'Elephant's Foot' in Chernobyl is part of the largest documented mass of corium

The nuclear disaster produced around 200 tons of nuclear fuel that mixed with the surrounding melted reactor core materials. As of 2025, corium has been naturally formed four other times in history: once during the Three Mile Island accident and three times at the Fukushima Daiichi plant disaster.

As of 2025, LUX-ZEPLIN is the world's most sensitive dark matter experiment

The experiment is designed to indirectly detect WIMPs—weakly interacting massive particles and a candidate for what dark matter is made of—by looking for light produced when they collide with xenon atoms. Such collisions would also release electrons, which are then manipulated to produce a secondary light signal that helps rule out background effects.

How fusion—which releases energy when two lighter atoms combine to form a heavier atom—differs from fission

Neutron stars, the remains of some massive stars after they explode in a supernova, are the densest directly observable objects in the universe.

As of 2025, the most cited papers in science include a review of graphene, methods to improve image recognition, streamlining electron density calculations, and optimizing protein studies.

In 2019, a laptop loaded with six of the worst malware in history and described as 'an exhibit of historical weaponry' sold for $1.3M.

The US dollar is the most widely circulated currency in the world, and is involved in nearly 90% of global transactions

The 1987 Nintendo video game 'Stadium Events' isn't known for being particularly fun, but its scarcity has made it a highly sought-after item that has sold for up to $35K at auction.

The price of gas is a composite made up of several different factors, with the federal gas tax making up less than 20% of what drivers pay at the pump.

Massive 3D printers have been used to build homes by stacking layers of 'concrete toothpaste,' a fire-resistant material that effectively insulates against outside noise.

Watch how deep-sea mining equipment collects and processes polymetallic nodules—metal-rich, potato-shaped rocks—from the ocean floor and creates environmentally damaging plumes of sediments.

In 1984, Operation Smash Hit intentionally crashed a 239-ton train into a nuclear waste canister at 100 miles per hour to prove the canister's safety, which remained completely intact and lost just 0.29 of its 100 pounds of pressure.

Learn more about the history of fireworks, which dates back to an accidental invention during an alchemist's quest for information about immortality.

Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency—a form of digital currency with a wide variety of uses—created around popular 'memes,' or viral internet jokes.

Stanford built a Google Maps for the Roman Empire, revealing how much it cost to travel in the ancient world

Read a deep dive on the 'all-purpose healing' peptide BPC-157.

Use this calculator to find the dollar value of your mental load, from meal planning to coordinating after-school care for your children.

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

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

Sunflowers have long been a symbol of nuclear disarmament because they can extract large amounts of radioactive cesium from soil.

Against his wishes, Albert Einstein's brain was removed before his cremation, and the pathologist responsible stored it for decades in mason jars within a beer cooler.

Explore our favorite visualization of the immense scale of space, from an astronaut to the size of the observable universe

Bone marrow (soft tissue found inside certain bones) generates roughly 500 billion new blood cells each day

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

Animal phobias are likely the most common type of phobias, followed by an extreme fear of heights.