Listen to the 'Star Wars' disco album

'Saturday Night Fever,' the 1977 film that introduced disco to the mainstream, was based on a fabricated magazine story.

The Beatles' US label rejected the band's first two singles, 'Please Please Me' and 'From Me to You,' with one executive calling the band 'dead in the water.'

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

Quincy Jones' 'Big Band Bossa Nova' helped introduce bossa nova—a jazz-influenced Brazilian genre—to the US

A small portion of The Winstons' 'Amen, Brother,' an obscure '60s gospel record, is the basis for thousands of hip-hop tracks, making it one of the most sampled records ever that's informally known as 'the Amen break.'

In 1945, Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí and legendary animator Walt Disney began collaborating on a short film that was not completed until 2003, years after both men had died.

Brian Wilson wrote the Beach Boys' 'Don't Worry Baby' for the Ronettes, but the legendary girl group rejected it.

The Ramones' 'Pet Sematary,' the theme song for the Stephen King novel of the same name, was written while the band was admiring the writer's collection of horror memorabilia.

Watch a 1934 short film starring jazz legend Cab Calloway, a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance's music scene

A century of Billboard issues documenting the evolution of popular music.

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.

Prince's sexually explicit 1984 track 'Darling Nikki' attracted the ire of the Parents Music Resource Center, an advocacy group that inspired the Parental Advisory sticker, even though the song ends with a Christian message.

70 years ago today, city officials in Santa Cruz, California, banned rock 'n' roll to protect its youth from corruption after witnessing a 'provocative' concert the night before.

A researcher recently discovered an interview from 1967 between groundbreaking journalist Joan Didion and the Grateful Dead, years before the band became an institution.

In preparation for this weekend's Eurovision finale, which is something like the World Cup of pop music, here's a young Céline Dion performing (for Switzerland?) at the 1988 competition.

Stars appear to twinkle because turbulence in the motion of molecules in Earth's atmosphere causes light to bend and wiggle rapidly on its way to the surface—a phenomenon called scintillation.

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.

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.

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.

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

Mid-century modern graphic designers, known for their bright colors and bold lines in advertising, also found success with children's books.

American dance legend Martha Graham, sometimes called 'the Picasso of dance,' refused to perform at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and conceived the piece 'Chronicle' in response to the experience.

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

Exploring the Larry Bird punch that almost changed March Madness

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

The history of many kitchen appliances involves unexpected discoveries and applications, including wartime radar turned hamster defroster and replacing an 'ice king' with heat-stealing boxes.

How the most famous Ebola book, The Hot Zone, which sold 3.5 million copies and was translated into 30 languages, got aspects of the disease so wrong.

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

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.

Jimmy Carter signed a 1978 bill that legalized home brewing, a move credited with kick-starting the craft beer industry.

Long before Major League Baseball began allowing instant replay for balls and strikes, an umpire reluctantly used the technology to determine whether a hit was a home run, a move that inadvertently ushered in a new era for the sport.

The Mona Lisa's celebrity status and repeated restorations have obscured what made the painting so revolutionary for its time

US intelligence allegedly pursued more than 600 schemes to assassinate Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro.

Double world record holder Hunter Ewen helped conquer his fear of balloons, called globophobia, by training to win Guinness World Record titles for balloon inflation.

Legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the SC Johnson headquarters in Wisconsin, aiming to make a cathedral-like workplace

In 2025, four executives from large tech companies were given positions in the US Army Reserves—including Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar, which reinforced Palantir's ties with the US military and its role as a leading defense partner.

After the Boston Tea Party, colonists switched to coffee, which became the main morning drink for revolutionaries.

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

Apollo astronauts left items in the moon's 'toss zone,' including golf balls, family photos, and bags of human waste, to make room for lunar rocks.

A pickleball's loud 'pop' sound can reach 120 decibels, which is equivalent to a hammer hitting a nail

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

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

The Nasdaq's 'Magnificent 7' companies are responsible for roughly 40% of the Nasdaq 100 index's gains, while the remaining 93 companies account for the other 60%.

Many legends about George Washington, including his supposed wooden teeth and the story of cutting down the cherry tree, lack evidence.

The story of Dollree Mapp, whose legal challenge over her 1957 conviction for possessing "obscene material" led to a major strengthening of the Fourth Amendment

The use of fungi to detoxify land and water—a process known as mycoremediation—has been used to clean up natural resources affected by the 2025 California wildfires.

Domino's Pizza's 30-minute delivery guarantee was responsible for the chain's 1980s surge, but it was discontinued after the company was found liable for delivery driver accidents.

Browse a detailed visual analysis of over 200,000 similes—comparisons that often use 'like' or 'as'—from popular fiction to see how frequently writers the same idiomatic expressions.

How Amazon operates a 'flywheel' business model, a self-reinforcing cycle that drives continuous growth

Up to a million Girl Scouts sell about 200 million cookie boxes every spring, generating $800 million, largely because refusing a child is frowned upon