Putin was the first world leader to call Bush after 9/11, and visited the US two months later

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.

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

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.'

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

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

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

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

See a 3D reconstruction of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

The US has discontinued a variety of different currency denominations over the years—including a $100K bill.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Although the moon passes between the sun and Earth each month, its orbit is tilted by five degrees, preventing Earth from experiencing a solar eclipse each month.

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

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

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

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.'

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.

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

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