Stress Less at the Library

Earth.nullschool.net, created by Cameron Beccario, is a beautiful and everchanging visualization of global weather conditions, ocean surface current estimates, ocean waves and surface temperatures, and aurora, forecast by NOAA supercomputers and updated regularly.

What do 100,000 interacting particles look like? This.

Images and animations captured by space exploration programs and released by the Jet Propulsion Library (at the California Institute of Technology).

A visualization of lighthouses across the world as they're currently flashing from a Dutch research institute.
Warning: flashing lights

Do you like looking at small things made big? Camera maker Nikon has sponsored an annual photomicrography competition since 1975. Browse the yearly winners, honorable mentions and images of distinction to examine nature up close.

This blog is a soothing balm for the stressed mind.

Open a new window somewhere in the world!

Random beautiful sights from Google's Street View.

Add new ambient sounds to your preference, from rain and wind to train stations and zombie battles.

Languages and dialects from around the world, pronounced by the people who live there. Listen to the speakers of the regions, or contribute your own!

Explore the depth of the ocean and who lives there with this neat tool from neal.fun.

Explore space as if it was small enough to do so from your computer.

An online museum of the history of the internet, complete with artifacts from the past you can still (sort of) use.

An open source "independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of." Who knows what you'll find?

A directory of 2000+ regularly updated blogs on a wide variety of subjects to amuse and entertain. Browse by topic or take a chance with the random blogs button!

Explore the vast reaches of space with neal.fun.

Take the space elevator as far as it can go and see what's up there.

Fall down the rabbit hole of this symbols encyclopedia and find "everything about symbols, signs, flags and glyphs arranged by categories such as culture, country, religion, and more."

"This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago."

A rich thesaurus that "lets you find any kind of word for any kind of writing." As with a traditional thesaurus, you can find synonyms and antonyms but are also able to search by description of the kind of word you need.

An tool designed to help you figure out the word you're thinking of based on a fragment of it.

Find a word by its definition instead of the other way around.

Test your typing skills in several languages! Compete with yourself or play against others.

A Chicago-based museum with a focus on buttons, as used for advertising, art, humor, politics, and more. A fun visual distraction.

Will write an essay on any topic! Try to trick it!
NOTE: NOT TO BE USED FOR AN ACTUAL ASSIGNMENT. This is a toy, not a means to cheat.

A fun history of food through time, from water and ice through Kool-Aid pickles.
Originally created and edited by Lynne Olver, now housed at Virginia Tech University Libraries and the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences.

How you and the planet have changed since the day you were born.

The elements plus what they do and where they're used.

Play with rocks.