A timeline of human fossil discoveries

Light takes approximately eight minutes to travel from the sun's surface to Earth, but it takes thousands of years to reach the star's surface from its core—a distance more than 200 times shorter.

Explore a collection of famous literary maps, including original images from 'Treasure Island,' 'The Swiss Family Robinson, ' and 'Walden.'

Explore an interactive timeline of Earth's 4.5-billion-year history to visualize shifting landmasses and oceans, view the locations of significant asteroid impacts, and learn about major geological and biological events.

The US jobs projected to shrink the fastest over the next decade include typists and word processors.

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.

Give your memories a place to live and explore the personal stories left by strangers, tied to specific locations, in this interactive map of the world.

'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.

Joan Didion interviewed The Grateful Dead in 1967, before they became music icons.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Streaming service Netflix's sound logo 'Tudum' was designed as a key sonic differentiator.

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.

Robert Smalls escaped slavery by piloting a stolen Confederate ship to freedom, then became an influential Black political leader during Reconstruction.

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.'

Emanuel Leutze's painting 'Washington Crossing the Delaware' is one of the defining images of the Revolutionary War.

'Golden blood' is the rarest blood type in the world—fewer than 50 people are known to have it.

Humans may have as many as 100,000 to 150,000 individual hairs on our scalps, growing at a rate of roughly 1 centimeter per month.

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

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.

The animatronic shark from 'Jaws' was a complex machine called 'Bruce.'

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

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.

Examine this captivating animation 'building' a human—illustrating the roughly 40 weeks of fetal development.

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

You may be better at spotting a lie when listening to a speaker's voice inflections rather than watching for facial and body cues.

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.

Explore the wineries of Napa Valley with an interactive map of its hundreds of wineries, vineyards, and tasting rooms.

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.

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

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

Find out how important you are to AI tools when they generate text responses with this tool, which estimates the weights of people's names.

Use this tool to calculate the dollar value of your parental mental load, from meal planning to coordinating after-school care, then see resources that help generate solutions.

Experience 14 billion years of important moments in world history with this scrollable interactive timeline.

Watch the many different civilizations around the Mediterranean shift power from the year 2500 BCE to 0 BCE in this animated map.

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.

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

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