A Boeing engineer created a next-generation pickleball paddle in the '80s

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.

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

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

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

Apeirophobia is the fear of everlasting life and may stem from the human brain's inability to conceptualize the concept of anything happening beyond what it can project out, such as the concept of an infinite life.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The Berlin Wall physically separated East and West Berlin for nearly three decades, preventing East Germans from fleeing to the West and earning the nickname 'the Iron Curtain.'

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

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

Explore (and debunk) the world's most contagious misconceptions—from the 5-second rule to sugar rushes—on this interactive site. Click on each misconception for further evidence.

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

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.

Although the moon passes between the sun and Earth each month, its orbit is tilted by five degrees, preventing Earth from experiencing a solar eclipse each month.

Sea stars are invertebrates—they lack a backbone—and while most exhibit pentametric radial symmetry due to having five arms radiating from a central disk, some can possess more than 40.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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