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This article was created in partnership with the National Geographic Society. Smokers around the world buy roughly 6.5 trillion cigarettes each year. That’s 18 billion every day. While most of a cigarette’s innards and paper wrapping disintegrate when smoked, not everything gets burned. Trillions of cigarette filters—also known as butts or ends—are left over, only…

Since 1972, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has recognized more than a thousand cultural and natural heritage sites around the world, with the goal of preserving humanity’s most precious places and traditions for future generations. From geological wonders to marvels of engineering, here are 10 family-friendly destinations that have been recognized…

A fungus that has wreaked havoc on banana plantations in the Eastern Hemisphere has, despite years of preventative efforts, arrived in the Americas. ICA, the Colombian agriculture and livestock authority, confirmed on Thursday that laboratory tests have positively identified the presence of so-called Panama disease Tropical Race 4 on banana farms in the Caribbean coastal…

Rather than being flat as a Frisbee, the Milky Way’s star-studded disk is twisted and warped, according to a new three-dimensional map of our home galaxy. If viewed from the side, the spiral arms girdling our galaxy’s bulging core would resemble a record bent into an S shape, or a softly poached egg sliding off…

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On the Greenland ice sheet, high at the top of the planet, things are not well. The heat wave that wreaked havoc on Europe in late July has now migrated northward, parking itself over Greenland. As air temperatures over the ice rise, the ice sheet is responding in the only way it knows how: by…

Abundant fossil bones, teeth, trackways, and other hard evidence have revealed that Earth was the domain of the dinosaurs for at least 230 million years. But so far, not a single trace of dinosaur remains has been found in rocks younger than about 66 million years. At that point, as the Cretaceous period yielded to…

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In a world dominated by spectacle, what are the auditory equivalents of the Eiffel Tower, Stonehenge, or the Grand Canyon? On vacation some years ago, I was leafing through a travel guide for sights to see and experiences to be had. It suddenly struck me that the book mentioned nothing about sound. It’s easy to…

The margarita-fueled party scene in Cabo San Lucas may claim the limelight, but the Mexican state of Baja California Sur has a wealth of natural and cultural treasures. On the southern half of the Baja California Peninsula, discover an often-wild desert landscape juxtaposed against brilliant blue waters teeming with life. Along the east coast, the…

A new way of measuring how some glaciers melt below the surface of the water has uncovered a surprising realization: Some glaciers are melting a hundred times faster than scientists thought they were. In a new study published today in Science, a team of oceanographers and glaciologists unpeeled a new layer of understanding of tidewater…