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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.'

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

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

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

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

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.

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 4-plus decades of Pixar's opening logos.

See a 3D reconstruction of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital

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

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

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.

Rapid intensification is the increase in a hurricane's sustained wind speed by at least 35 miles per hour within 24 hours, which can strengthen it by up to two categories.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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