Read Linus Torvalds' commenting on his first posts about Linux in the comp.os.minix newsgroup

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

Male pattern baldness accounts for more than 95% of hair loss in men and is characterized by thinning hair, hair loss, and a receding hairline.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.'

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Apeirophobia is the fear of everlasting life and may stem from the human brain's inability to conceptualize the concept of anything happening beyond what it can project out, such as the concept of an infinite life.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.'

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.