The 'Sign Post Forest' in Canada's Yukon collects roadsigns from across the globe

The slow disappearance of America's roadside attractions

Roadside attractions, as defined by Jane Stern, are quirky, oddball landmarks. Instead of corporate entertainment, charms like a giant twine ball, a shabby dinosaur sculpture exhibit, or hand-painted oddities beckon travelers off the interstate. These roadside attractions have declined in recent years, but Stern commemorates their value and reflects on the joy of discovering unusual and homemade wonders in this piece.

British Columbia's 'Infinite Coast' is a hidden travel gem

The long expanse of Pacific coast north of the US border includes Victoria, Vancouver Island, the Great Bear Rainforest, fjords, whale watching, and 50 First Nations that manage the coastline. This site presents the region in an engaging interactive format to attract travelers looking for lesser-known areas of natural beauty.

National Geographic's list of best places to visit in 2023

National Geographic has released its latest Best of the World list with 25 must-see destinations for 2023 from Alberta, Canada, to Busan, South Korea.

Roughly 350,000 billboards advertise across the US

The world's oldest form of advertising can feel antiquated in a digital age, but the place-specific signs are the basis of a $9B business. Learn the history of these ads and how they remain relevant in a digital age.

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.

The Canadian side of Niagara Falls has many tourist attractions

The Canadian side features Ripley's Believe it or Not, Louis Tussaud's Waxworks, tunnels behind the Falls and more. A short walk from the falls leads to Clifton Hill, packed with arcades, mini golf, haunted houses, and carnival-style attractions.

Feds crack down on sassy highway signs

Digital signs warning drivers to make good decisions have taken on some sass in recent years. No more, says the Federal Highway Administration.

How the beaver became Canada's national symbol

The beaver has been the national symbol of Canada since 1975, where over 1,000 locations are named after the animal. Intimately tied up with the country's economic development via the fur trade, the beaver is a well-established motif in Canadian society. Though the species was endangered in the late 1900s, conservation efforts have returned them to a "secure" status.

A gallery of places without addresses on Google Street View

Google Street View records billions of images of streets across the world. Within those photos are many "unplaces," locations that appear to have some purpose or former history but do not have an address. This site curates some of those images and seeks further information from users. You can peruse the odd, fascinating locations spread across both rural and urban areas.

See how Britain promoted imperial trade through 1920s propaganda posters

This photo gallery showcases posters from the Empire Marketing Board, created after Canada gained dominion status in 1926. The campaign encouraged Canadians to buy goods from across the British Empire, producing more than 800 posters displayed nationwide.

A popular tag in World War II announced 'Kilroy was here'

The graffito appeared seemingly everywhere throughout the 1940s and followed a similar pattern: A man with an oversized nose peering over a ledge, with the phrase written below it. Scholars believe it was an American form of similar tags that appeared in Australia and England, making "Kilroy" a meme long before the word had entered the lexicon.

King sets many of his stories in Maine

In the process, he has created a few fictional towns. This extensive travelogue by a superfan explores the writer's favorite haunts, pinpointing specific details from and inspirations for King's fiction. Helpfully, it also provides plenty of photos, allowing you to venture through King's haunted version of the state without ever leaving the comfort of your home.

Mapping the world records held by each US state

What world record does your state hold? Check out this map of the United States to see what weird accomplishment took place near you.

Ansel Adams' photographs captured the majesty of a growing National Park System

The famed American photographer was an ardent conservationist and believed deeply in the promise of the national parks. His photos sought to capture the feeling of seeing the parks' mountains, lakes, and vistas firsthand. Below is one example, taken at Lake McDonald in Glacier National Park.

Driving the 99 bends up China's Tianmen Mountain Big Gate

A huge rock gate sits atop a mountain in China's northwestern province of Hunan, where visitors climb 999 stairs to crest the natural wonder. For years, tourists used a cable car to reach the top, but a thrilling, curvy road was built in recent decades to allow for better access—and has become an attraction in itself.

Explore fun facts from the USPS, including unique post office buildings, a stamp that traveled past Pluto, and more.

Malaysia is home to a massive McDonald's museum

Top Fast-Food Toy Collections Museum in the city of Alor Setar houses over 80,000 McDonald's items, including Happy Meal toys, employee uniforms, and ketchup packets.

The US has over 4 million miles of roads. Learn about how highways are designed and the geometry behind what makes them safe and efficient

The Detroit 59ers moved to Alaska to develop the land

After Alaska became a state in 1959, 21 Detroit families set out for the Last Frontier, intent on cultivating the land through the Homestead Act. The act offered free land in the state for anyone who met the requirements for developing its sparsely populated areas.

An inventory of ancient trees in the United Kingdom

The world is filled with trees that are hundreds—if not thousands—of years old, and the UK's Woodland Trust believes each one deserves the same protections great cathedrals and castles receive. This active database invites users to peruse...

A day in the coldest village on Earth

The people of Yakutia, a far northern region of Russia, live a challenging, but harmonious, life with nature, facing some of the world's coldest temperatures. Tag along for the day with 9-year-old Arian and his family to see how they manage the cold, from constant wood-chopping to keep their home warm to the meticulous ice fishing which sustains their diet.

Meet the Marree Man, one of the world's largest works of art

In the summer of 1998, a pilot flying over the Australian outback discovered a geoglyph 1.7 miles long featuring an aboriginal man hunting. The massive work of art is one of the world's largest.

An interactive sound map of 8,000 locations around the world

Cities and Memory's global sound map covers 140 countries, featuring paired recordings: original field captures of a moment in time and an artist's recomposition built from the same source. The structure treats every location as both document and raw material, giving 2,500 contributors the same prompt with unpredictable results.

There are more than 300 separate sign languages worldwide

Each of these languages has its own grammar, vocabulary and cultural associations. American Sign Language, the predominant Deaf language in the US, is part of the broader French Sign Language family, which means it shares historical influences and similarities with French Sign Language (which is called LSF). International Sign is a simplified, makeshift form of communication that borrows from many languages, and it's used at international deaf conferences, among other locations.

2 months after Pearl Harbor, American libraries launched a drive to collect 10 million books for soldiers

The 1942 Victory Book Campaign—sponsored by the American Library Association, the Red Cross, and the USO—asked the public to donate books to both train and entertain troops. The national campaign exceeded its goal, collecting more than 10.2 million books.

Frank Lloyd Wright made a gas station in Minnesota

Located in Cloquet, Minnesota, the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed full-service gas station and repair shop is still in operation today, attracting visitors from all over the world. The station exists thanks to a local oil businessman who tapped Wright for the job.

See the 25 of the best photos of auroras from around the world.

Explore an interactive map built from more than 100,000 survey responses on where people find joy in their lives

'Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone,' a work by American painter Thomas Moran, inspired Congress to establish Yellowstone National Park.

Meet the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence—most of whom didn't put pen to paper until August 2, 1776—and see their original signatures.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Power lines are dotted with large, brightly colored balls to improve the visibility of these thin wires to helicopters and small planes and help prevent potential crashes.

In 2018, 26-year-old missionary John Allen Chau was killed by tribesmen after attempting to reach and evangelize on India's isolated North Sentinel Island

In its famous catalog, Sears sold $600 DIY house kits from 1908 through the 1940s, resulting in an estimated 100,000 'Sears and Roebuck homes.'

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.

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

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

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

Poison ivy was sent to Europe in the 1600s as an exotic, ornamental oddity, where it was purposefully grown in the English royal gardens at Kew, the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, and a few other locations.

In 1963, a basement renovation in Turkey revealed a passageway to a hidden, multilevel underground city that once housed as many as 20,000 people

Walt Disney's early film 'Alice's Wonderland' was a groundbreaking innovation in the silent film era

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.

In 1939, baseball star Lou Gehrig delivered his inspirational 'Luckiest Man' speech after retiring due to the health condition that now bears his name.

Comedy legend Catherine O'Hara, star of 'Schitt's Creek' and 'Home Alone,' quit 'Saturday Night Live' after just one week to return to her old job.

The American Society of Civil Engineers' infrastructure report card gave the US a C in 2025, its highest grade since the project launched in 1998.