The average electric vehicle motor has about 20 moving parts

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

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.

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

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

Washing dishware before putting it in a dishwasher may reduce the appliance's effectiveness because it dynamically adjusts wash time and temperature based on a sensor that detects dirtiness.

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.

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 an interactive timeline of Earth's 4.5-billion-year history to visualize shifting landmasses and oceans, view the locations of significant asteroid impacts, and learn about major geological and biological events.

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

You may be better at spotting a lie when listening to a speaker's voice inflections rather than watching for facial and body cues.

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.

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

If the moon were less than one-twelfth its current distance from Earth, the planet's tidal forces would overcome the moon's internal gravity, tearing it apart and forming a ring of debris.

One of the most famous portraits ever taken is 'Afghan Girl' (1984) by Steve McCurry, yet the subject Sharbat Gula went much of her life without being identified or benefitting from the image's success.

One of the most famous portraits ever taken is "Afghan Girl" by Steve McCurry. Sharbat Gula, the subject of the photo, was not credited until 2002 for her role in the famous National Geographic cover, and continued to live in poverty after the photo was taken.

Check out some of the best books that can be read in a single day, with titles from Han Kang, Denis Johnson, Muriel Spark, and more.

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

'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.

See a 3D reconstruction of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital

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

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

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.

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.

'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.

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

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.

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

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.'

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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