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

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.

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.

If a source of music traveled past someone at twice the speed of sound, assuming sufficiently sensitive hearing and powerful equipment, they would hear the music backward.

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.

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

Here are some tips from Pew Research to help you distinguish between a good poll and an unreliable one.

Watch President John F. Kennedy's speech on going to the moon

Metamorphosis evolved over millions of years as species that hatched as smaller versions of adults started exhibiting genetic mutations that differentiated juvenile and adult bodies.

Plato's famous allegory of the cave is a metaphor exploring the value of truth over ignorance.

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

Researchers generally group gut bacteria into six different categories, with varying amounts of these microbes residing in different parts of the digestive tract.

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

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

Although the moon passes between the sun and Earth each month, its orbit is tilted by five degrees, preventing Earth from experiencing a solar eclipse each month.

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.

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.

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

The US has discontinued a variety of different currency denominations over the years—including a $100K bill.

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

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

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.

Listen to audio clips from Hoover, a harbor seal named after its insatiable appetite, who learned to say English phrases such as 'hello there' and 'come over here.'

See a 3D reconstruction of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital

A dog's nose can be up to 100,000 times more sensitive than a human's, and each possesses a secondary organ for smelling, which helps learn about other dogs when they sniff each other's butts.

Watch what would happen if you literally had all the money in the world.

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.

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.'

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.

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.

Located on Ross Island in Antarctica, Mount Erebus is the southernmost active volcano on Earth and features a lava lake—one of eight known worldwide as of 2026—that erupts regularly.

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

The collapse of gas bubbles in the joint synovial fluid causes 'cracking' knuckles.

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.'

There are 'YouTube camps' that teach children how to create content for the video platform.

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

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.

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

The tallest tsunami in recorded history was 524 meters (1,720 feet) high—taller than the Empire State Building—and occurred in Lituya Bay, Alaska, in 1958 after an earthquake dislodged a rockface into the water.