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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

See a 3D reconstruction of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital

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

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

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

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.'

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

The Berlin Wall physically separated East and West Berlin for nearly three decades, preventing East Germans from fleeing to the West and earning the nickname 'the Iron Curtain.'

Watch an animated visualization of how the Large Hadron Collider works, including how particles are accelerated through a series of machines and how collision data is collected and distributed worldwide.

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

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

Watch 4-plus decades of Pixar's opening logos.

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.'

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.

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.

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

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

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