On a cruise ship, the average person uses about 50 gallons of water a day, which is treated by bacteria and onboard filtration systems, then stored until the ship can legally discharge the wastewater.

'Bibliotherapy' is of increasing interest as a way to improve mental health and help navigate complex life situations—with people immersing themselves in the experiences of fictional characters or nonfiction and self-help books to find relief and gain personal insights.

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

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

Explore an interactive forecast of the future of the universe, from the return of Halley's Comet to the last light in the cosmos.

Visualize the path of every solar eclipse from 1900 to 2099 and see what each looks like when observed from different locations on Earth.

In 1962, the US detonated a nuclear weapon in space, which produced an electromagnetic pulse that disabled three low Earth orbit satellites and damaged electrical equipment in Hawaii.

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.

'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.

Lake Sørvágsvatn sits about 32 meters (105 feet) above sea level, but the taller surrounding cliffs create an optical illusion that makes it appear to float much higher above the ocean.

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

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

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

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.'

Explore a detailed map of Odysseus' fictional journey from 'The Odyssey.'

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

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.

Between 2002 and 2012, at least 12 people were killed in the Philippines in incidents related to off-key karaoke singing of Frank Sinatra's 'My Way.'

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.'

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

See a 3D reconstruction of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital

Watch footage from the moments the Titanic wreck was discovered by a joint US-French research team in 1985.

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

Explore the known asteroids, comets, and spacecraft involved in asteroid studies within our solar system with 'Eyes on Asteroids,' a 3D visualization from NASA.

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.

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.

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.

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

If the moon were less than one-twelfth its current distance from Earth, the planet's tidal forces would overcome the moon's internal gravity, tearing it apart and forming a ring of debris.

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

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

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.