The Ishango bone suggests mathematics was born about 20,000 years ago

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

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.

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

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

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.'

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.'

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

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.'

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

'Bibliotherapy' is of increasing interest as a way to improve mental health and help navigate complex life situations—with people immersing themselves in the experiences of fictional characters or nonfiction and self-help books to find relief and gain personal insights.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.