With help from Michelle Obama, Sesame Street kicks off it's Google-hyped 40th-anniversary season tomorrow—the first in new a two-year environmental-education effort. "Scary" issues like global warming, though, are off-limits.

Asteroids slamming into Earth, a planet sneaking up on us, an angry sun singing the planet—find out why these and other end-of-the-world events won't be happening in 2012.

Just as some people today believe a Maya calendar pinpoints 2012 as the end of the world as we know it, people through centuries and across cultures have long forecast our collective doom.

Newborn babies start learning language in the womb—and are born with accent-like intonations, a new study of crying babies says.

Sesame Street character Cookie Monster is gobbling Google's logo for the show's 40th anniversary. But around the world it's other Muppets that steal the show—and reflect the cultures and conflicts of each region.

Behind today's Google doodle: Get the facts on Halloween 2009 and Halloween history, this year's most popular costumes, record-breaking pumpkins, and more in National Geographic News's Halloween roundup.

Forty years after the first simple network message crossed California and crashed the Internet's precursor, the system's current ubiquity leaves at least one of its creators "surprised and totally pleased."

In time for Halloween, archaeologists have unearthed a witch bottle—a stone jug that may have contained toenails, hair, and other bodily bits to deter witches and other evildoers.

Forty years after the first simple network message crossed California, the Internet has transformed our lives—and experts argue it should be a right, rather than a privilege.

A far cry from the Twilight vampires, naughty nurses, and Spider-Men of 2009, the first Halloween costumes included animal skins and heads, drag getups, and even mechanical horse heads, historians say.

Get the facts on Halloween history, today's most popular costumes, record-breaking pumpkins, and more in National Geographic News's 2009 Halloween roundup.

Wild dromedary camels, brought to Australia in the mid-19th century to help explore and develop the outback, were left to breed and survive on their own. Now they number a million in the wild and have become pests, officials say. Video.

When is the big daylight saving time (often called daylight savings time) switchover in autumn 2009? Why do we fall back in the first place?

Australia's iconic, island-like Uluru, or Ayers Rock, may soon be off limits to climbers, mainly because Aborigines see the desert sandstone formation as sacred. Video.

Highway bridges, an 80s public library, and a concrete powerboat arena are just some of the U.S. structures named on the World Monument Fund's 2010 Watch List of landmarks worth preserving.