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

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

See a 3D reconstruction of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.'

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Lesser-known phobias include turophobia, or the fear of cheese, and nomophobia, the fear of being without your cell phone.

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

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

Give your memories a place to live and explore the personal stories left by strangers, tied to specific locations, in this interactive map of the world.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

On a cruise ship, the average person uses about 50 gallons of water a day, which is treated by bacteria and onboard filtration systems, then stored until the ship can legally discharge the wastewater.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

'Tulip mania,' the 1630s Dutch craze where rare bulbs were briefly traded like luxury assets, may have been the first financial bubble—and it still shapes markets today.