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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

On a cruise ship, the average person uses about 50 gallons of water a day, which is treated by bacteria and onboard filtration systems, then stored until the ship can legally discharge the wastewater.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.'

Abraham Lincoln had to sneak into Washington, DC, in disguise for his 1861 inauguration after a detective uncovered a plot to assassinate him in Baltimore.