Some scientists hypothesize that stressed rocks can discharge built-up static electricity in the form of lightning—a phenomenon known as fracto-luminescence, or earthquake lights.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Stonehenge was built using giant wooden rollers and precisely carved tongue-and-groove joints to lock the stones in place.

This short animation shows how human beings managed to lug 30-ton stones over miles of prehistoric English countryside and stand them up The Stone Age engineering involved using giant wooden rollers and carving precisely interlocking tongue-and-groove joints to hold the heavy stones in place.

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.'

Abraham Lincoln had to sneak into Washington, DC, in disguise for his 1861 inauguration after a detective uncovered a plot to assassinate him in Baltimore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.'

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

Miracle berries make things that normally taste acidic or sour, such as lemons, taste sweet, like sugar-coated candy, by binding a special protein called miraculin to taste buds.

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.

Experience 14 billion years of important moments in world history with this scrollable interactive timeline.

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

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

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.