What is free verse?

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

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

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

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

'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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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 breakdown of the canine family tree that explains how foxes and wolves are related to our beloved household pets, like poodles and dachshunds.

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

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

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

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

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.'

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

See a 3D reconstruction of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital