Polio commonly spreads when virus-laden feces gets into our mouths

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

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.

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.

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.

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

See a 3D reconstruction of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital

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.

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.

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

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.

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.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.'

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.

Watch what would happen if you literally had all the money in the world.

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

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.'

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Watch the many different civilizations around the Mediterranean shift power from the year 2500 BCE to 0 BCE in this animated map.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

'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.