Intellect PlusCards starting with A
11,854 cards. Page 160 of 198.
An ancient Alexandrian built a coin-operated vending machine for holy waterDrop a coin into Hero's machine and it landed on a small pan, tipping a lever that opened a valve and let out a measured dose of water for ritual washing. When the coin slid off, …
An ancient Armenian epic survives not in books, but through the voices of bards.For centuries, the Daredevils of Sassoun was transmitted solely by word of mouth across the Armenian Highlands. This heroic saga of four generations of warriors, now a UNESCO-reco…
An ancient engraved bone suggests Neanderthals practiced symbolic expressionResearchers studying a 51,000-year-old bone found in a German cave discovered an engraved giant deer toe bone. The discovery of these deliberate incisions in a Middle Palaeolithic…
An ancient Ice Age lake now serves as a testing ground for exploring Venus.Once a massive body of water nearly the size of Lake Michigan, Lake Bonneville vanished, leaving behind vast, flat salt flats. Today, these remnants of a prehistoric landscape ser…
An ancient Indian physician counted 63 ways to mix six tastesThe Sushruta Samhita, a classic of Indian medicine, notes that six basic tastes can be combined in 63 different ways, singly, in pairs, in threes and so on. That tally, every poss…
An ancient Indian sage nicknamed eater of atoms proposed indivisible particlesCenturies before modern chemistry, the Indian philosopher Kaṇāda argued that matter cannot be divided forever. Somewhere the splitting must stop at tiny, eternal particles he call…
An ancient Mexican building was angled to face the rising of CapellaAround 275 BC, builders at Monte Albán in Oaxaca set one structure, Building J, askew from everything around it. Its steps were aligned so that someone standing in its doorway wou…
An ancient painter lost a contest by trying to pull back painted curtainsZeuxis painted grapes so lifelike that birds swooped down to peck them. Then his rival Parrhasius invited him to draw aside a pair of ragged curtains, and Zeuxis reached for fabri…
An ancient reptile breathing innovation paved the way for birds to conquer the skies.Unlike humans who empty their lungs with every exhale, ancient reptiles developed a more efficient respiratory system. This evolutionary breakthrough provided the foundation for b…
An ancient tick preserved in amber reveals a prehistoric parasiteA newly discovered specimen of an extinct tick, trapped in amber, offers a rare glimpse into the parasitic relationships that existed alongside dinosaurs.
An ancient, invisible boundary divides the wildlife of the Indonesian islandsBetween two Indonesian islands lies a mysterious, invisible line that separates distinct biological worlds. This video explores the nature of this geographic divide and why it rem…
An Andean condor once soared 171 kilometres without a single wingbeatCondors lack the large breastbone needed to anchor big flight muscles, so they flap only to take off, then ride rising air from one thermal to the next. One Andean condor held tha…
An aneurysm is a ballooning weak spot in a vessel wallAs the bulge grows, rupture risk rises toward uncontrolled bleeding. True aneurysms involve all three arterial wall layers; false ones are contained leaks beside the vessel. The d…
An Anglo-Irish poet midwifed a national theatreWilliam Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) stood at the center of twentieth-century literature and the Irish Literary Revival. Protestant, Dublin-born, Sligo-haunted, h…
An anti-pollution fable, The Lorax still ended up selling SUVs and diapersDr. Seuss wrote The Lorax in 1971 as a warning about greed and pollution. Illumination's 2012 film version signed more than 70 product tie-ins, including a Mazda SUV advert featur…
An antidepressant became a go-to sleep drug despite a guideline against itTrazodone was approved in 1981 to treat depression, yet much of its fame comes from a job it was never licensed for: helping people sleep. By the early 2000s it was the second mos…
An antipsychotic that turns dopamine up when it's low and down when highMost older antipsychotics simply block dopamine. Aripiprazole, sold as Abilify, behaves more like a thermostat: as a partial agonist it boosts dopamine signalling where levels run…
An anvil's sheer weight is what makes every hammer blow countA good anvil is heavy for a reason. All that inertia means the energy of a hammer blow flows into the glowing metal instead of shoving the block around. A cheap cast-iron lump den…- An aortic aneurysm is usually silent until it bursts, which is why screening mattersThe body's largest artery can quietly balloon to over one and a half times its normal width without causing a single symptom. The first sign is often a rupture, with sudden agonis…
An apple weighs about two newtons, which feels like a fitting tributeHold a medium apple of 200 grams and your palm is resisting roughly two newtons of pull. The unit of force carries Isaac Newton's name because it falls straight out of his second …
An Arab chronicle of 851 ranked India's Rashtrakutas among four great world empiresIn 851 an Arabic text, the Silsilat al-Tawarikh, counted the Rashtrakutas as one of the world's four principal empires. At their height these Deccan rulers stretched from the Gang…
An Arab oil embargo nearly tripled the world priceIn October 1973, Arab OPEC producers (OAPEC) embargoed nations backing Israel in the Yom Kippur War—initially Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, the UK, and the United States under S…
An Arab trader’s island name stuck to a Southeast African coastMozambique, on Southeast Africa’s Indian Ocean shore, borders Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Eswatini, and South Africa. Portuguese Moçambique came from Mozambique Island, it…
An Arabian sultanate ranked the UN’s most improved in forty yearsOman, a sultanate on the southeastern Arabian Peninsula, borders Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Yemen, with Iranian and Pakistani maritime neighbours. The Al Bu Said dynasty has ruled…
An arboretum is more than a park; it is a living museum of trees.While we often view trees as mere scenery, an arboretum is a curated, scientific collection designed for stewardship and study. From ancient Egyptian transplanting efforts to Vict…
An arc flash can reach temperatures hotter than the surface of the Sun.When electrical energy jumps through air, it creates a violent explosion of light, heat, and plasma. This phenomenon, known as an arc flash, can vaporize metal and cause severe in…
An archbishop coined weapons of mass destruction years before the atom bombThe phrase weapons of mass destruction first appears on record in 1937, spoken by Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, as he reflected on the bombing of Guernica and the w…
An archbishop gave English the phrase 'welfare state' during the Second World WarGermans had spoken of a sozialstaat, or social state, since 1870, but that literal label never caught on in English. During the Second World War the Anglican Archbishop William Te…
An archbishop kidnapped the boy emperor Henry IV off a Rhine boatIn 1062 Archbishop Anno of Cologne lured eleven-year-old King Henry IV onto a ship and cast off. Terrified, the boy leapt into the Rhine and had to be fished out. Anno then ruled …
An Arctic polynya keeps whales breathing between ice sheetsBaffin Bay lies between Baffin Island and Greenland as an IHO marginal sea of the Arctic, tied to the Atlantic by Davis Strait and Labrador Sea and to the polar basin by Nares Str…
An Arctic sea that thaws for only two monthsThe Kara Sea, a shelf of the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia, spans roughly 1,450 by 970 kilometres and about 880,000 square kilometres, yet stays ice-bound for all but two months. …
An Argentine asado uses no marinade at all, just salt, fire and patienceAt a proper asado the meat gets salt and nothing else. The skill lies in the fire: the asador picks the right wood, keeps the meat at a careful distance from the coals, and stops …
An argument with a bank teller launched Charlize Theron's Hollywood careerIn Los Angeles in 1994, broke and living in a motel, Theron was pleading with a bank clerk to cash her mother's out-of-state rent cheque. The man behind her in the queue, talent a…
An armada of 120 ships built a secret Arctic air base in one summerIn June 1951 a fleet of 120 ships left Norfolk, Virginia, carrying 12,000 men and 300,000 tons of cargo to northwest Greenland. Working around the clock under the midnight sun, th…
An Armenian monk's thousand-year-old prayer book is treated like a talismanAround 1002, a monk on the shores of Lake Van finished 95 chapters of anguished prayer, each addressed straight to God. Armenians have kept Gregory of Narek's Book of Lamentations…
An arrow to the face: the 1403 battle that nearly ended a dynastyIn the summer of 1403, the English crown hung in the balance. At the Battle of Shrewsbury, a bloody civil war pitted brother against brother, leaving the future King Henry V with …
An assassin learns to date to save his sister from a forced marriageHikaru Gero, a lethal operative from a centuries-old clan of killers, faces an ultimatum: marry and produce an heir, or watch his sister be forced into the role. To escape this, h…
An asthma drug first pulled from tea leaves is a cousin of caffeineTheophylline was extracted from tea leaves around 1888, and its name joins the old genus name for tea with the Greek word for leaf. Chemically it is a close relative of caffeine a…
An asthmatic boy barred from sports grew into Scorsese, cinema's great chroniclerAsthma kept young Martin Scorsese off the streets of Little Italy, so his family took him to the movies instead. The boy who once wanted to be a priest became a defining New Holly…
An asthmatic boy from Sendai became figure skating's first men's Super Slam winnerYuzuru Hanyu was diagnosed with asthma at two and started skating at four only because a coach wanted him out from under his sister's feet. He went on to win back-to-back Olympic …
An astronaut connects with his German hometown while orbiting high above the EarthEuropean Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst shares a unique perspective from the International Space Station, bridging the gap between orbital life and his roots in Kunzelsau,…
An astronaut records a music video from the International Space Station to celebrate connectionNASA astronaut Drew Feustel, commander of Expedition 56, recorded an original music video while orbiting Earth. Featuring lyrics by Gord Sinclair of the Canadian band The Tragical…
An astronaut returns to space training after a personal tragedyNASA astronaut Mark Kelly is resuming his duties as commander of the STS-134 mission. This video covers his return to training following a period of personal leave to care for his…
An astronaut sends a message of support to the James Webb Space TelescopeESA astronaut Matthias Maurer shares a message of encouragement for the James Webb Space Telescope from the International Space Station. This video highlights the connection betwe…
An astronomer used wartime blackouts to peer toward the Milky Way's heartIn the early 1940s, Los Angeles went dark under wartime blackout rules, and Walter Baade seized the chance. Using the 100-inch Hooker Telescope on Mount Wilson, he found a gap abo…
An Australian magazine gave the Skyline GT-R its famous monster nicknameThe Skyline GT-R was never built outside Japan and was officially exported to only a handful of countries, yet the name Godzilla came from Australia. The motoring magazine Wheels …
An Australian soap opera about a crocodile attack became a global cult phenomenon.After being pushed into a crocodile-infested river by her husband, heiress Stephanie Harper survives, undergoes plastic surgery, and returns as a glamorous supermodel to exact rev…
An Austrian emperor swapped chamois for New Zealand ferns and birdsIn 1907 Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria sent New Zealand eight Alpine chamois in exchange for living ferns, rare birds and lizards. After a sea voyage and a rail journey, the go…
An Austrian lakeside village of 780 people gave its name to an Iron Age cultureHallstatt squeezes onto a thin strip of shore beneath the Dachstein mountains, yet its salt made it rich thousands of years ago. The mine is the oldest still working anywhere, its…
An autonomous drone system beats world champions in high-speed racingResearchers developed an autonomous system called Swift that can pilot a first-person view drone at the level of human world champions. By combining deep reinforcement learning in…
An average thunderhead weighs about half a million kilogramsThe towering storm cloud called cumulonimbus holds roughly 500,000 kilograms of water on average, and its top can climb to 12 kilometres, sometimes 20 or more. It is the largest c…
An avulsion injury occurs when body tissue is forcibly torn from its original attachment.Whether it is a piece of bone pulled away by a tendon, skin stripped from a limb, or a nerve detached from the spine, an avulsion is a traumatic separation. While some minor cases…
An āyah is more than just a verse; it is a sign of the divine.While commonly translated as a verse of the Quran, the term āyah carries a deeper, dual meaning. Linguistically, it signifies a sign, evidence, or miracle. Beyond the written text…
An Aztec masterpiece where Mesoamerican artistry meets the European RenaissanceThe Codex Azcatitlan is more than a historical record; it is a visual collision of two worlds. Combining traditional Aztec accordion-folding with European paper and three-dimensio…
An early 1960s learning machine had a 'goof' button for mistakesRaytheon's Cybertron, built by the early 1960s, stored its memory on punched tape and learned to recognise sonar signals, heart traces and speech through repeated coaching by a hu…
An early Christian handbook vanished for centuries, then turned up in 1873Church writers quoted it, argued over whether it belonged in the Bible, and then lost it. In 1873 a Greek metropolitan found a complete copy of the Didache, made in 1056, in a mon…
An early Christian manual preferred cold running water for baptism, but allowed warmChristians have argued for centuries over how much water baptism needs. The Didache, a guide from between AD 60 and 150, preferred cold running water, accepted still or warm water…- An early plastic IUD was moulded on cookie sheets in a kitchen ovenIn the late 1950s, Dr Jack Lippes and plastics developer Paul Bronnenkant heated and shaped plastic on cookie sheets in Bronnenkant's kitchen. The result, the Lippes Loop, became …
An early rocket firework called the earth rat once startled a Chinese empressAt a feast given in her honour by Emperor Lizong in the 13th century, Empress Dowager Gong Sheng was badly startled when a dilaoshu, or earth rat, went off near her. This scurryin…
An earthquake handed Portugal to its most feared ministerWhen the 1755 earthquake flattened Lisbon, one of the deadliest in history, a little-known minister kept order, organised relief and rebuilt the capital in a new style still named…