The Emancipation Proclamation shifted the purpose of the war for the Union

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

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

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

Explore the history of American restaurants through an archive of menus dating back to the early 1800s.

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

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

Watch a visualization of what it would look like to move along Earth's surface as fast as the International Space Station, or about 23 times the speed of sound.

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.

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

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

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

All rainbows are 'raincircles' caused by water droplets separating white sunlight into a spectrum of colors, but Earth's surface blocks the bottom half of the circle from our line of sight.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.'

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.

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.

See a 3D reconstruction of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Semaglutides, which belong to a class of drugs called GLP-1s, are prescribed for weight loss in combination with diet and exercise because they trigger the release of the appetite-suppressing hormone incretin.

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

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