David Foster Wallace's iconic commencement speech

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

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

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.'

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

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

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.

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

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

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.'

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.

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

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.

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

'Golden blood' is the rarest blood type in the world—fewer than 50 people are known to have it.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Experience a century of America's healthcare advances with this medical visualization, tracing a sampling of healthcare innovations from head to toe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Streaming service Netflix's sound logo 'Tudum' was designed as a key sonic differentiator.

Peek into the love lives of thousands of strangers whom Stanford University researchers have been tracking since 2017 on this interactive page.

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

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.

See a 3D reconstruction of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital

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.

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 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.

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

'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.

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

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.

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