An animated short film portraying the arc of addiction

'Susan's Brain': what happens to the brain during addiction

This engaging animation from Harvard Online breaks down the neuroscience of addiction through the story of “Susan’s brain,” demonstrating how addictive substances hijack normal reward pathways. Through clear visual metaphors and approachable narration, it explains complex brain chemistry in understandable terms.

'The opposite of addiction isn't sobriety—it's human connection'

This thought-provoking TED talk from journalist Johann Hari challenges conventional wisdom about addiction, with a special focus on his global research investigating its root causes. Through personal stories and scientific evidence, Hari debunks some of the most common myths around addiction.

What it feels like to live with dementia

This nine-minute short film attempts to answer what it feels like to fade into dementia, as memory, motor skills, and cognition steadily decline. This award-winning short film follows Jos, a married father who worked in hospitality, as he sinks into ,"what feels like a single day. Or is it years?"

Explore this animated story about loneliness that situates modern statistics about isolation

This beautiful "scrollytelling" story—weaving together animations and text as a user scrolls down a page—takes a reader through a typical weekend day in 2021, drawing data from the American Time Use Survey. It underscores the loneliness that many people may experience, highlighting potential unaddressed mental health needs.

Fame can trigger addictive, drug-like highs in the brain

Differences in the type of fame, such as movie stardom, sports, and internet virality, can produce varying degrees of dependence on individuals based on their age and background. Some individuals—particularly children—can develop drug-seeking behavior as they pursue continuous dopamine spikes if they lack an existing sense of fulfillment from elsewhere.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse's resource library

The National Institute on Drug Abuse website is an in-depth and highly prolific resource on addiction science. Explore the vast scope of this website to access comprehensive guides, data visualizations, and educational materials on all facets of addiction and its treatment.

A video showing how drug dealing really works

What motivates people to sell drugs? The “News on Drugs” series asks how people get drawn into the drug trade, unpacking the different goals and aims involved in dealing drugs. While there is a lot of focus on cartels, traffickers, and gangs...

The 2022 best picture winner, 'CODA,' was an Apple+ original

Streaming has changed more than how we watch movies—it's changed the way we recognize them during awards season. When movie theaters shut down during the early days of the pandemic, studios had no choice but to release their films on streaming. Once the shift occurred, there was no going back.

GLP-1 drugs are under investigation for treating Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and drug addiction

Researchers are investigating GLP-1 applications for a variety of chronic conditions. One area of interest stems from how study participants using GLP-1 for diabetes and obesity reported describing less longing for wine and cigarettes while taking the medication—intriguing researchers about using the drugs for addiction applications. The drug, they theorize, could bind to receptors that mediate desire. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

Watch a pinecone become a pine tree

Sometimes a closer look at an ordinary process can uncover its glory This timelapse video presents the wondrous natural process of a withering pinecone turning into a full sprouted tree. A nearly two year growth, watch the seed turn to seedling and rise over time.

‘The Substance’ is a great food film

"The Substance" has received numerous accolades, including five Academy Award nominations, for its satirical horror story about celebrity. This writer argues that it's also one of the best food movies in recent memory.

Watch an AI-generated short film

The Waymark production company created "The Frost" using the AI platform DALL-E 2. Set in an apocalyptic future where the weather has been stalled, the film was made by stitching together hundreds of clips, each only a few seconds long.

The first Cannes Lions winner

The first Cannes Lions award went to the German toothpaste brand Chlorodont for the ad “Il Circo,” a surreal short film featuring dancers, a wild animal, and a snake charmer—all constructed from Chlorodont’s product.

'Lazy Sunday' was YouTube's first viral hit

Initially aired on television, the 2005 "Saturday Night Live" digital short featuring Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell took off on YouTube, becoming one of the platform's first viral videos. The song may be a joke, but its success underscored how online video could extend the lifespan of regularly televised content.

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

Watch Walt Disney's early innovative film, 'Alice's Wonderland'

This 1923 short, "Alice's Wonderland," was the first volume in what would come to be known as the "Alice Comedies." It features a young girl who ventures into Disney's animated world—a technique that might seem quaint now but was groundbreaking in the silent film era.

Inside the pigeon race with $50K at stake

More than 1,000 pigeons are released each year at the American Racing Pigeon Union convention as owners wait to see which of the birds arrives home first. This essay unwraps the niche activity's paradoxical love for the birds despite its at times utilitarian treatment of them.

Visualizing the enormity of plastic waste compared to global landmarks

The team at Reuters Graphics visualizes the world’s addiction to plastic bottles. Around the world, almost 1 million plastic bottles are purchased every minute. The illustrations included in this visual explainer show what that pile of plastic would look like if it was collected over longer periods of time and how large the piles would be compared to famous landmarks.

‘The Giant Pool of Money’ remains one of the most acclaimed accounts of the 2008 housing bubble

This Peabody Award–winning "This American Life" episode traces how cheap global money, subprime lending, and Wall Street engineering inflated the housing bubble. Through vivid reporting and real voices, it became one of the defining works of 2000s financial journalism.

Netflix profits when you're not watching, and its movies are designed that way—read a detail-rich critical essay exposing lesser-known Netflix takes

A list of some of the best episodes from David Attenborough's works and where to watch them

From the first steps of the long-eared jerboa—an animal not captured on film before "Life Story"—and bears catching salmon on their upstream pilgrimages to the bioluminescent sea creatures in the trenches of the ocean and Weddell seals giving birth, learn where to see some of the most remarkable moments in Attenborough's catalog.

Barbara Kingsolver's 'Demon Copperhead' reframes Dickens for the opioid crisis

The 2022 novel is a retelling of Dickens' autobiographical coming-of-age novel "David Copperfield." Kingsolver moves the story from Victorian England to contemporary Appalachia, where the opioid crisis is raging. The book won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Watch a goldfish drive a car

Dutch engineer Thomas de Wolf created a car for a goldfish, or a water tank on wheels that is directed by the movements of the creature inside it. Using a motion-sensing camera, when Blub the fish moves to one side of the tank, the camera moves in the same direction.

In 2017, researchers won a Nobel Prize for their work controlling fruit fly circadian rhythms

This detailed circadian rhythm infographic breaks down a day in the biological life of a fly, providing a peek at some of the groundbreaking work that elicited a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

The psychology of narcissism

It's not just an insult: Narcissistic personality disorder impacts thousands of people—and there are ways to get better. Here's a short video explaining it.

NFTs are unique assets that exist on the blockchain

This SNL skit accurately defines non-fungible tokens in a song and skit. They are cryptographic tokens that represent digital assets like art, and their value can be volatile.

4-minute overview of gold mining in the Amazon rainforest

A 2022 NBC news investigation of gold mining in the Peruvian Amazon rainforest. Much of the $3B in illegal gold is trafficked to the US every year.

Watch how algorithms can be designed to train themselves and self-improve without human input, to the point where the optimized code is too complex for programmers to understand.

Learn how your body is, scientifically, like a firework with its own slow, controlled burn.

After NASA's Voyager 1 captured Earth as a single pixel as it left the solar system in 1990, astronomer Carl Sagan used the image to reflect on humanity's fragility and the responsibility to protect 'the only world we've ever known.'

A vending machine run with Anthropic's AI went out of business after it was convinced to give away items for free and sell a video game console.

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.

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

After 25 people used virtual reality headsets to practice flying with virtual wings—flapping their arms—their visual cortex responded to the wings almost as if they were real arms, treating them as body parts.

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.

See the evolution of Ebola vaccine and treatment development.

Children are now three times more likely to say they want to be a YouTuber when they grow up than an astronaut, with some even attending 'YouTube camps' that teach kids how to create content for the platform.

Alzheimer's can lead to brain shrinkage, with an average of around 2% of volume reduction per year

American short story writer Flannery O'Connor raised 40 peacocks, which became potent symbols for her fiction's elegant violence

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

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

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

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.

Some researchers have labeled nomophobia, the fear of being without your phone, as 'the phobia of the 21st century.'

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.

Some Pokémon have been named after real and fictional organisms, while some real-world species have been named after Pokémon, such as Chilicola charizard and Binburrum zapdos.

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.

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

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.

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