Chuck Taylors were once the definitive basketball sneakers

The average banana produces one positron—the antimatter counterpart to an electron—every 75 minutes as its trace amounts of radioactive potassium decay.

There are up to 100 trillion microbes in the gut, and maintaining the relative balance in this ecosystem is important for our health.

Lesser-known phobias include turophobia, or the fear of cheese, and nomophobia, the fear of being without your cell phone.

Explore the history of American restaurants through an archive of menus dating back to the early 1800s.

Peek into the love lives of thousands of strangers whom Stanford University researchers have been tracking since 2017 on this interactive page.

George Lucas used Joseph Campbell's 'hero's journey,' a narrative structure that encompasses the common characteristics of multiple cultures' mythologies, to revise 'Star Wars.'

Play the role of a student as you try to navigate college and remain debt-free.

Male pattern baldness accounts for more than 95% of hair loss in men and is characterized by thinning hair, hair loss, and a receding hairline.

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.

One of the most famous portraits ever taken is "Afghan Girl" by Steve McCurry. Sharbat Gula, the subject of the photo, was not credited until 2002 for her role in the famous National Geographic cover, and continued to live in poverty after the photo was taken.

See where your state ranked in an analysis of the best public school systems in the US.

Watch an animated visualization of how the Large Hadron Collider works, including how particles are accelerated through a series of machines and how collision data is collected and distributed worldwide.

Stonehenge was built using giant wooden rollers and precisely carved tongue-and-groove joints to lock the stones in place.

This short animation shows how human beings managed to lug 30-ton stones over miles of prehistoric English countryside and stand them up The Stone Age engineering involved using giant wooden rollers and carving precisely interlocking tongue-and-groove joints to hold the heavy stones in place.

Explore Lewis and Clark's 8,000-mile journey in Google Earth.

Explore the 2025 Uber Lost & Found Index to find out the weirdest items that passengers left behind in Ubers last year, from ten live lobsters to a mannequin head with human hair.

Author David Foster Wallace's 'This Is Water' speech provides guidance for adulthood.

Miracle berries make things that normally taste acidic or sour, such as lemons, taste sweet, like sugar-coated candy, by binding a special protein called miraculin to taste buds.

Fecal transplants can help treat infections by transplanting healthy gut bacteria from a donor into a patient's gastrointestinal tract using samples of human waste, which are turned into a liquid mixture and often delivered via a colonoscopy procedure.

Experience a century of America's healthcare advances with this medical visualization, tracing a sampling of healthcare innovations from head to toe.

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

Computer scientists first started trying to optimize dating using computers in the 1950s.

Simulations suggest that a paper airplane launched from the International Space Station would maintain its orientation and gradually descend for 3.5 days before chaotically tumbling down and burning up.

Cats have a mutation that prevents them from tasting sweetness, and goldfish rank among the world's supertasters.

Sea stars are invertebrates—they lack a backbone—and while most exhibit pentametric radial symmetry due to having five arms radiating from a central disk, some can possess more than 40.

As part of the up to 15 pounds of seafood they consume daily, sea otters eat urchins that feed on kelp forests—sources of shelter and food to over 800 species—thereby making the marine mammal a keystone species.

The Aztec Empire ruled over 80,000 square miles of central Mexico for nearly a century—until a small band of Spanish conquistadors brought it down in 1521.

Relax to a livestream of brown bears chilling in Katmai National Park in Alaska.

'Tulip mania,' the 1630s Dutch craze where rare bulbs were briefly traded like luxury assets, may have been the first financial bubble—and it still shapes markets today.

Check out some of the best books that can be read in a single day, with titles from Han Kang, Denis Johnson, Muriel Spark, and more.

Watch a breakdown of the canine family tree that explains how foxes and wolves are related to our beloved household pets, like poodles and dachshunds.

The Berlin Wall physically separated East and West Berlin for nearly three decades, preventing East Germans from fleeing to the West and earning the nickname 'the Iron Curtain.'

Explore (and debunk) the world's most contagious misconceptions—from the 5-second rule to sugar rushes—on this interactive site. Click on each misconception for further evidence.

Watch a two-year time-lapse of a pinecone seed transforming into a pine tree.

Explore how the most commonly used words in the English language have changed from the 1950s to 2023.

Humans tend to imagine aliens as humanlike, but that's probably unlikely. Three different hypothetical planets show how aliens' bodies could take many forms.

On planets in systems with two stars, such as the fictional Tatooine from 'Star Wars,' observers would see overlapping rainbows and double rainbows.

Explore 3D models of some of the most dangerous viruses, allowing us to understand these and other pathogens in new ways.

This interactive website features nearly 40,000 photos from Wikipedia for you to create visual mosaics with.

See a breakdown of how some of the most common food items are traded across the globe, including the key trade relationships for each item.

Watch Bruce Springsteen's 1985 performance of Woody Guthrie's 'This Land Is Your Land,' which he calls 'the greatest song ever written about America.'

The final shots of the Civil War were fired in the Arctic over 2 months after the South's surrender.