Some people may be genetically predisposed to loving roller coasters

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 Aztec Empire ruled over 80,000 square miles of central Mexico for nearly a century—until a small band of Spanish conquistadors brought it down in 1521.

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.'

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Watch Dr. Laurence Peter explain his 'Peter Principle,' which states that people are promoted to their level of incompetence and explains why bosses aren't always good at their jobs.

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

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

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

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

See a 3D reconstruction of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital

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

Play the role of a student as you try to navigate college and remain debt-free.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.