Billions of flies are being dropped from the sky

Pregnancy makes someone more attractive to the mosquito species that transmits malaria.

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.

'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.

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

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

Apeirophobia is the fear of everlasting life and may stem from the human brain's inability to conceptualize the concept of anything happening beyond what it can project out, such as the concept of an infinite life.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Explore how temperatures compare to historical averages in cities worldwide with this interactive global monitor.

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

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

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.

Watch Dr. Laurence Peter explain his 'Peter Principle,' which states that people are promoted to their level of incompetence and explains why bosses aren't always good at their jobs.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.'

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

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

The world's largest waterfall is in the ocean and is more than three times the height of Angel Falls, the largest waterfall on land.