Intellect PlusCards starting with B
4,403 cards. Page 73 of 74.
Bullfrogs hitchhiked globally on dinner platesLithobates catesbeianus, the American bullfrog, is eastern North America's giant true frog of permanent ponds and swamps. People ate it so eagerly that introductions now span more…
Bulls cannot see red, and the gentle ones are the most dangerousThe matador's red cape has nothing to do with the bull's charge. Cattle, like most mammals, are red–green colour blind, so it is the cape's motion that provokes them. Farming lore…
Bullying in childhood can lead to lasting health and social difficultiesA review of the impact of bullying found that one in three children globally have experienced bullying within the last 30 days. The research suggests that the negative effects of …
Bumblebee colonies stay small—sometimes just fifty workersMore than 250 Bombus species make up the only living bumblebee genus in family Apidae. Most are eusocial with one queen, yet nests stay far smaller than honeybee hives—sometimes o…
Bungie went from hand-packed boxes in a Chicago flat to a Sony takeoverBungie's first game was a free Pong clone called Gnop!, with its source code sold for $15. Its founders later folded Macintosh game boxes by hand in a one-bedroom Chicago apartmen…
Bunin won Russia's first literature Nobel writing exile brocadeIvan Bunin (1870–1953) became the first Russian awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1933. Critics praised a prose-and-verse texture so dense they nicknamed it "Bunin brocade…
Burberry dressed polar explorers and Everest climbers before it dressed the catwalkWhen Roald Amundsen raced to the South Pole and Ernest Shackleton set out to cross Antarctica, their gear came from a draper's shop founded in Basingstoke. Thomas Burberry had inv…
Burgess Meredith was a master of stage and screen, yet he faced a decade-long blacklist.Beyond his iconic roles as the Penguin and Mickey Goldmill, Burgess Meredith was a virtuosic actor who navigated the golden age of theater and Hollywood. Despite his immense talen…
Burgundy was once a European superpower that rivaled the French crown itselfLong before it became synonymous with fine wine, Burgundy was a formidable medieval state. Stretching from the Alps to the North Sea, the Valois-Burgundian realm operated as a wea…
Buried beneath the surface, ancient soils act as silent witnesses to Earth's deep history.A paleosol is a fossilized soil, preserved for eons under layers of volcanic ash or sediment. These subterranean time capsules offer geologists a rare, direct link to the atmosphe…
Buried by sand, Rome’s ancient port city reveals secrets that the capital cannot.Ostia Antica was once the bustling maritime gateway to Rome, essential for grain and military might. Abandoned and eventually swallowed by sand dunes, the site remained remarkably…
Buried deep in Antarctic ice, a massive telescope listens for the universe's smallest particles.The IceCube Neutrino Observatory uses the frozen depths of the South Pole to capture elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos. By monitoring light flashes within a cubic kilom…
Buried sandstone cements itself by dissolving the points where its grains touchUnder kilometres of sediment, sand grains press so hard against each other that the strained contact points dissolve. That dissolved mineral then settles into the open pores and g…
Burma's dictator Ne Win ruled for 26 years and died without a state funeralNe Win began as a failed biology student, became one of the Thirty Comrades who fought for Burmese independence, and seized power in a 1962 coup. For a quarter-century he steered …
Burma's independence hero set out for China and ended up in TokyoIn 1940, with a price of 500 rupees on his head, Aung San slipped out of Burma on a Norwegian cargo ship under a false name, hoping to reach communist contacts in China. He drifte…
Burma's last dynasty built an empire then lost it to BritainThe Konbaung or Third Burmese Empire ruled from 1752 to 1885 as Burma's final dynasty, second-largest in Burmese history, continuing Toungoo administrative reforms that seeded the…
Burma’s last royal capital on the IrrawaddyMandalay, Myanmar’s second city after Yangon, sits on the Irrawaddy’s east bank 631 km north of Yangon, with 1,225,553 people counted in 2014. King Mindon founded it in 1857 to re…
Burmese identity is a complex tapestry of 135 ethnic groups and colonial legaciesThe term Burmese refers to all citizens of Myanmar, yet it is often confused with the Bamar, the country's largest ethnic group. This distinction is more than semantic; it is root…
Burning labels with lasers: The short-lived brilliance of HP's LightScribe technologyLightScribe promised a futuristic way to label discs by using the same laser that burned data to etch images directly onto the surface. It was a marvel of consumer engineering tha…
Burning old tally sticks destroyed Britain's medieval Parliament in one nightOn 16 October 1834, workers fed a stove with the Exchequer's obsolete wooden tally sticks. It overheated, set the Lords chamber alight, and most of the medieval Palace of Westmins…
Burnley won England's league title with a squad that cost just £13,000When Burnley became champions of England in 1959–60, they had spent only £13,000 on transfers: £8,000 for playmaker Jimmy McIlroy and £5,000 for defender Alex Elder. The rest of t…
Burnout is officially a work phenomenon, not a medical diagnosisThe World Health Organization describes burnout as exhaustion, cynicism about one's job and falling effectiveness caused by unmanaged workplace stress. Yet it deliberately stops s…
Burrowing owls protect themselves by mimicking the sound of a rattlesnakeLiving underground makes burrowing owls vulnerable to predators. To defend themselves, these birds have evolved a clever acoustic defense mechanism that mimics the warning sound o…
Bursa is Turkey’s fourth city and an early Ottoman seatBursa, capital of its namesake province in northwestern Turkey, ranks as the country’s fourth-most populous city and second in the Marmara Region after Istanbul. Roman Bithynia al…
Burslem: The Mother Town of the Potteries that once sat at a crossroadsKnown as the Mother Town of Stoke-on-Trent, Burslem evolved from a small medieval farming hamlet into a global hub for fine ceramics. While its industrial landscape has shifted, t…
Burt Bacharach defined the sound of a generation through complex, unconventional pop arrangements.A classically trained pianist who haunted jazz clubs as a teenager, Burt Bacharach transformed popular music. By blending sophisticated harmonies with unexpected time signatures, …
Burt Lancaster went from circus acrobat to Hollywood star via an elevatorAfter an injury ended his circus act and the war ended his Army entertainment job, Burt Lancaster was visiting his girlfriend at work when a producer sharing the elevator urged hi…
Buru: The Indonesian Island That Served as a Prison for Literary GeniusBuru is the third-largest island in Indonesia's Maluku archipelago, a rugged landscape of tropical forests and endemic wildlife. Beyond its natural beauty, the island holds a dark…
Burundi is a rare African state that traces its roots to a pre-colonial kingdom.Emerging in the 16th century, Burundi survived centuries of regional rivalry and colonial rule to remain a direct territorial descendant of its original state. Yet, its modern his…
Buryatia: A Siberian Republic Shaped by Ancient Empires and Modern GeopoliticsNestled along the shores of Lake Baikal, the Republic of Buryatia is a land of dramatic contrasts. From its deep-rooted shamanic traditions and Tibetan Buddhist heritage to its co…
Busan hosts APEC and Asia’s games as Korea’s second cityBusan, South Korea’s second city after Seoul, holds over 3.3 million people across fifteen districts and one county as of 2024. It staged an APEC summit in 2005 and the 2002 Asian…
Bushehr: A Strategic Coastal Province Shaping Iran's Energy and Naval FutureLocated along the Persian Gulf, Bushehr province is a vital hub for Iran's naval operations and energy exports. From its historical struggle against Portuguese occupation to its m…
Bushido was never a single, static rulebook for the legendary Japanese samurai classWe often imagine bushido as a rigid, ancient code of honor that every samurai followed. In reality, it was a shifting collection of unwritten expectations, moral philosophies, and…
Busification: The controversial practice of forced street-level military conscription in wartime UkraineBusification describes the aggressive, often physical, detention of men by recruitment officers in public spaces across Ukraine. As the war persists, this practice of forcing indi…
Business Insider began as a blog about Manhattan's tech sceneBusiness Insider started in 2007 as Silicon Alley Insider, a single blog about New York's tech scene. Within eight years a German publisher paid $343 million for most of it. Along…
Businesses everywhere still keep their books the way 1290s Florentine merchants did.Double-entry bookkeeping records every transaction twice, as a debit in one account and an equal credit in another, so the books must always balance. The oldest surviving example …
Busking is an ancient global tradition that shapes urban culture and public lifeFrom the streets of ancient Rome to modern subway stations, busking has served as a vital, often misunderstood, form of public performance. Whether through circle shows or walk-by…
Bustards are grassland giants from forty to 150 centimetersBustards—including floricans and korhaans—are hefty ground birds of dry grassland and steppe, spanning about 40 to 150 centimeters in length. Twenty-six living species eat leaves,…
Buster Keaton hated this film, but a last-minute rock avalanche saved his career.Forced to adapt a play he despised to settle a debt, Buster Keaton initially considered his 1925 comedy Seven Chances a failure. Yet, a spontaneous addition to the final act—a mas…
Buster Keaton's famous stone face began as a child trick to get bigger laughsAs a toddler in his family's vaudeville act, Buster Keaton was flung across the stage by his father, with a suitcase handle sewn into his clothes. He noticed audiences laughed har…
Buster Keaton’s most iconic stunt relied on a single nail and two tons of wood.In the 1928 silent comedy Steamboat Bill, Jr., Buster Keaton performs a death-defying feat: a two-ton house facade collapses around him, leaving him unscathed only because he stan…
Butoh is a Japanese dance form that intentionally resists being defined or codified.Born in post-World War II Japan, butoh is a radical dance theatre movement that rejects traditional aesthetics in favor of the grotesque, the taboo, and the visceral. It is not a …
Butrint: The Ancient Mediterranean Port That Survived Empires, Earthquakes, and Centuries of AbandonmentPerched on a hill in modern-day Albania, Butrint is a layered chronicle of history. From its origins as a Greek polis to its role as a Roman colony and Byzantine stronghold, this …
Butter, olive oil and your body fat share one simple molecular shapeAlmost every fat you eat or store is a triglyceride: one glycerol backbone with three fatty acid tails attached. Whether it sits as a solid block of lard or pours as olive oil dep…
Butterflies live four lives: egg, caterpillar, pupa, adultButterflies of superfamily Papilionoidea wear large, often vivid wings that commonly fold at rest. As holometabolous insects they pass egg, larva, pupa and winged adult. Tropics m…- Butterfly species share protective wing patterns through genetic exchangeResearchers who sequenced the genome of the postman butterfly found that different species of Heliconius butterflies share genes responsible for their protective wing colors. By c…
Button, cremini and portobello are all the same mushroom at different agesThe white button mushroom, the brown cremini or chestnut, and the big flat portobello are one species, Agaricus bisporus, sold at different stages and colours. The white version d…
Buttons began as jewellery, not shirt fastenersShell discs at Mohenjo-daro may be five thousand years old, yet they ornamented cloth long before anyone punched a buttonhole. Medieval Europeans still relied on toggles and lacin…
Butts counted newspaper letters to price Scrabble tilesTwo to four players score by laying letter tiles on a 15-by-15 board so words read like a crossword. Architect Alfred Mosher Butts invented the game in 1931; by 2008 roughly 150 m…
Buying a company can mean buying its shares, its assets, or a shellWhen one firm swallows another, the deal's legal shape matters as much as its price. Buy the shares and you inherit every old liability. Buy only the assets and you can leave the …
Buying foreign goods can be a way of importing foreign labourWorkers move across borders far less freely than products do. So countries often trade the goods that contain those inputs instead. When the United States buys labour-intensive pr…
Buying stock does not create new investment, but it does facilitate capital allocation.When you buy shares on an exchange, you are not funding a company; you are simply swapping ownership with another investor. The real engine of economic growth is the Initial Publi…
Buzkashi is a high-stakes, ancient Central Asian game of horse-mounted capture the flag.Imagine a game of capture the flag played on horseback, where the flag is a goat carcass and the field is a chaotic, dusty arena. This is buzkashi, the national sport of Afghanist…
Buzz Aldrin wrote his way to the Moon with a doctorate on orbital rendezvousNASA turned Buzz Aldrin down in 1962 because he had never been a test pilot. So he leaned on something no other candidate had: an MIT doctorate on how spacecraft could meet in orb…- Bwindi Impenetrable National Park: A High-Altitude Refuge for Half the World's Mountain GorillasTucked into the rugged Kigezi Highlands of southwestern Uganda, this ancient, biologically diverse forest serves as a critical sanctuary for endangered mountain gorillas. While th…
By 1900, astronomers had measured the distances to only about 60 starsPinning down exactly where a star sits sounds dull until you learn that nobody managed a single stellar parallax until Friedrich Bessel. Astrometry, the science of star positions,…
By 1914 Russia had Europe's largest peacetime army, and 15 million servedThe Imperial Russian Army lasted from 1721 to the revolution of 1917. On the eve of the First World War it was the biggest standing army in peacetime Europe, around 1.3 million me…
By 1935 she out-earned almost every AmericanMae West (1893–1980) turned double entendre into a fortune: by 1933 a top U.S. box-office draw, by 1935 the nation’s highest-paid woman and second-highest-paid person after Willia…
By 1945 Carmen Miranda was the best-paid woman in AmericaThe woman in the towering fruit hat was born in a Portuguese village, raised in Rio and started out making hats in a shop. Within six years of arriving on Broadway, Carmen Miranda…
By 1987 over a quarter of US symphony players had used heart pills against stage frightBeta blockers were built to protect hearts, blunting the effect of adrenaline on the body. Musicians soon found they also steadied trembling hands, and a 1987 survey of the 51 lar…