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.'

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rapid intensification is the increase in a hurricane's sustained wind speed by at least 35 miles per hour within 24 hours, which can strengthen it by up to two categories.

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

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.'

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

Sea stars are invertebrates—they lack a backbone—and while most exhibit pentametric radial symmetry due to having five arms radiating from a central disk, some can possess more than 40.

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

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.

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.'

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Explore the known asteroids, comets, and spacecraft involved in asteroid studies within our solar system with 'Eyes on Asteroids,' a 3D visualization from NASA.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Lake Sørvágsvatn sits about 32 meters (105 feet) above sea level, but the taller surrounding cliffs create an optical illusion that makes it appear to float much higher above the ocean.

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