Cholera can persist in the environment, unlike smallpox, which needs a human host

'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.

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

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.

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.'

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.

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

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

See a 3D reconstruction of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital

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.

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.

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.

Washing dishware before putting it in a dishwasher may reduce the appliance's effectiveness because it dynamically adjusts wash time and temperature based on a sensor that detects dirtiness.

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

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

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.

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.

Researchers generally group gut bacteria into six different categories, with varying amounts of these microbes residing in different parts of the digestive tract.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.'

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

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

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

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

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

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.