Explore the collection.

Around Saturn’s north pole, a jet stream traces an enormous hexagon. The atmosphere has been drawing the same improbable shape for decades.

Beneath the frozen surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus lies a global ocean. Material from its interior escapes through fissures near the south pole.

This desert plant looks like a heap of fraying ribbons. Its adult foliage is just two leaves, growing continuously from their bases.

Recovered from an ancient shipwreck, this corroded mechanism used precisely arranged gears to calculate astronomical cycles.

Yale’s Beinecke Library holds an illustrated manuscript written in an unidentified script. Its author and meaning remain debated.

Deep inside an Arctic mountain, genebanks store duplicate seeds as insurance against the loss of their own collections.

Across a dry lakebed in Death Valley, rocks leave long trails in the mud. Researchers have observed the rare conditions that move them.

The Long Now Foundation’s mechanical clock is designed to keep time for 10,000 years. The design makes the distant future a practical engineering problem.

At Harvard, jars of pigments form a reference collection for understanding the materials artists used to make their work.

In 1860, a phonautograph traced a sung voice onto a surface. Researchers recovered audible sound from that recording in 2008.