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.'

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

See a 3D reconstruction of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital

'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.

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

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

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

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

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

Simulations suggest that a paper airplane launched from the International Space Station would maintain its orientation and gradually descend for 3.5 days before chaotically tumbling down and burning up.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

'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 Bruce Springsteen's 1985 performance of Woody Guthrie's 'This Land Is Your Land,' which he calls 'the greatest song ever written about America.'

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

There are up to 100 trillion microbes in the gut, and maintaining the relative balance in this ecosystem is important for our health.