Intellect PlusCards starting with C
9,109 cards. Page 113 of 152.
Casting agents told Kathy Bates she wasn't pretty enough; she won an OscarEarly in her career Kathy Bates heard from more than one casting agent that her looks would hold her back. She kept taking odd, older, stranger parts, worked the till at the Museu…
Casting directors called young Angelina Jolie too dark, then she won an OscarAt sixteen Angelina Jolie decided to act professionally, only to be rejected at auditions for seeming too dark. She was so dismayed by her first lead, a direct-to-video robot sequ…
Castle country on León’s frontier became Spain’s engineCastile began as León’s ninth-century eastern march, its “land of castles” name attested by 800 and mirrored in Arabic Al-Qila. Counts clawed autonomy, then kingship, pushing sout…
Castles were far more than just defensive walls against enemy sieges.Medieval European castles functioned as symbols of authority, private homes, and centers of regional governance. This video examines how these complex structures evolved over time…
Castles were private homes built to fight from, not just hide inHistorians define a castle narrowly: a lord's private fortified residence. That rules out walled cities, Anglo-Saxon burhs and most things crusaders called castles. It also explai…
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 attempted to modernize a gothic legend with mixed resultsReleased in 2014, this ambitious sequel shifted the franchise into an open-world setting while casting the player as the iconic Dracula. Despite praise for its fluid combat and gr…
Castries: The Caribbean Capital Built on Reclaimed Land and ResilienceAs the capital of Saint Lucia, Castries is a vital Caribbean hub defined by its deep-water port and grid-patterned streets. Yet, this city is more than a transit point for cruise …
Cat eyes are about six times more light-sensitive than oursThe cat family, Felidae, counts forty-one living species, all strict meat-eaters with the most varied coat patterns of any land carnivores. They share a toolkit honed for ambush: …
Catalan Alliance: The Nationalist Party Reshaping the Political Landscape of CataloniaFounded in a small rural town, Catalan Alliance has rapidly evolved from a local municipal force into a significant player in the Parliament of Catalonia. Combining radical indepe…
Catalan cello master bowed Bach into moral lawPau Casals, born 29 December 1876 in El Vendrell, rebuilt cello tone and treated Bach's solo suites as daily scripture. After Franco's 1939 victory he chose exile over Nationalist…
Catalans mark their national day on the anniversary of a defeat in 1714Every 11 September, Catalonia commemorates the day Barcelona surrendered to Bourbon forces, ending its status as a separate state within the Spanish crown. That choice says much a…
Çatalhöyük packed a Neolithic city into forked tumuliÇatalhöyük—Turkish for fork tumulus—is a vast Neolithic–Chalcolithic proto-city on Turkey’s Konya Plain that thrived from about 7500 to 5600 BCE, peaking near 7000 BCE. UNESCO lis…
Catalonia prepares for its next regional vote to select the 16th parliamentary session membersCatalonia is gearing up for its next regional election, which must occur by June 26, 2028. Voters will determine the composition of the 135-seat legislature, a body that holds sig…- Catalonia's count-city outgrew mythical Barca foundersBarcelona, Catalonia's capital, is Spain's second municipality after Madrid. Tradition credits Phoenician or Carthaginian traders; some tie the name to Hamilcar Barca without firm…
Catalytic converters forced lead out of American petrolLead is a catalyst poison: it coats the precious metals inside a catalytic converter and stops them working. So when American rules put converters on most petrol cars from the 197…
Catania keeps rebuilding itself in black lava at the foot of EtnaSicily's second city sits at the base of Mount Etna, one of the world's active volcanoes, and has paid for it. An earthquake nearly erased Catania in 1169, lava almost engulfed it…
Catatonia can freeze a person for days, yet many remember everything afterwardsSomeone with catatonia may hold a strange posture against gravity, stay silent for days, or instead move frantically without purpose. Long tied to schizophrenia, it turns up more …
Category theory maps maths by arrows, not just objectsInvented mid-century by Samuel Eilenberg and Saunders Mac Lane for algebraic topology, category theory treats structures by how they relate. Objects sit at ends of morphisms—arrow…
Caterpillar got its name from a photographer peering at a tractorSteam tractors kept sinking into the soft farmland around Stockton, California. Benjamin Holt's fix was to swap the wheels for wooden tracks bolted to chains, first tested on Than…
Caterpillars are eating machines with a toolkit of disguises and chemical weaponsA tobacco hornworm can multiply its weight ten-thousandfold in under twenty days. Caterpillars exist to eat, and because so many animals want to eat them in turn, they have evolve…
Cathay Pacific was started by two wartime pilots with one DC-3Two former air force pilots who had flown the Hump over the Himalayas founded Cathay Pacific in Hong Kong in 1946. Their first plane was a Douglas DC-3 nicknamed Betsy. They added…
Catherine Blake printed and coloured a “mad” genius’s booksWilliam Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) died obscure and was later crowned a Romantic prophet of word and image. Neighbors called him mad; posterity praised the mystical…
Catherine the Great bought 225 paintings and founded a hermitageIn 1764 the Russian empress purchased a Berlin dealer's Western pictures and tucked them into private Winter Palace apartments meant as a refuge from court. That royal hideaway gr…
Catherine the Great bought Diderot's library and paid him to keep itBy 1766 the chief editor of the Encyclopédie was broke and unrecognised. Russia's empress heard, bought his 3,000 books for 15,000 livres, left them with him as paid custodian and…
Catherine’s Greek Plan renamed a Black Sea port OdessaOdesa (also Odessa) is Ukraine’s third-largest city and a warm-water Black Sea transport hub, seat of oblast and raion government. Classical Greeks settled nearby by the mid-sixth…- Catherine’s Yekaterinoslav became Dnipro on the DnieperDnipro is Ukraine’s fourth-largest city, about one million people, 391 km southeast of Kyiv on the Dnieper. Cossack settlement shows from at least 1524; imperial Yekaterinoslav—“g…
Cathy Freeman remains one of the fastest women to ever run the 400 metresAt the 2000 Sydney Olympics, Cathy Freeman became an icon by winning gold on home soil. Yet, her legacy extends far beyond the track. From breaking barriers as an Indigenous Austr…
Catnip evolved to repel insects, and about a third of cats ignore itThe chemical that sends cats rolling and purring is not really aimed at cats. Nepetalactone, the key compound in catnip, most likely evolved to keep plant-eating insects away, and…
Cato the Elder ended speeches demanding Carthage be destroyedLate in life, the Roman statesman Cato the Elder reportedly closed speeches with the same blunt line: Carthage must be destroyed. The stern farmer-soldier also wrote the oldest su…- Cats drink by pulling a water column with their tongueDogs scoop like ladles; cats barely tip the tongue, then snatch it back so a thin column of liquid follows into the mouth before the jaws close. Ruminants plunge their muzzles. Sa…
Cats in wooden puzzle boxes taught psychology how learning actually happensEdward Thorndike shut cats in boxes that opened only when a lever or switch was pressed. Watching other cats escape did not help them, nor did guiding their paws. They stumbled on…- Cats largely tamed themselves, and their genes still show itUnlike dogs or cattle, cats were never heavily bred for work, so they stayed close to their wild African ancestors and kept their hunting instincts. A typical house cat carries ab…
Cats, ducks and ants were humanity's first pest controllers, long before DDTEgyptians were setting cats loose in grain stores around 3000 BC, and Chinese farmers placed colonies of weaver ants in citrus orchards to eat beetles and caterpillars. Pest contr…- Catsharks are not cats, but these bottom-dwelling predators possess some truly bizarre survival strategies.Catsharks, or Scyliorhinidae, are a diverse family of ground sharks found in oceans worldwide. While they are generally harmless to humans, they employ fascinating tactics to surv…
Cattails fed Ice Age Europeans and kept Second World War sailors afloatStarch grains left on grinding stones show Europeans eating cattail rhizomes 30,000 years ago. Much later the United States Navy stuffed life vests with cattail down in place of k…
Cattle plague pushed France to invent veterinary schoolClaude Bourgelat opened the first veterinary school in Lyon in 1761–1762 after watching cattle plague wreck French herds. Students helped stop the outbreak, and the model spread i…
Caucasian Albania is not the Balkan countryAncient authors used Albania for a Caucasian kingdom mostly in today's Azerbaijan. The prefix Caucasian exists only to stop modern readers confusing it with Adriatic Albania—a nam…
Caucasian Albania: The Ancient South Caucasus Kingdom Often Confused With Its Modern NamesakeThis documentary explores the history of Caucasian Albania, a distinct kingdom situated between the Kura River and the mountains of Dagestan. It clarifies the confusion surroundin…
Caught between empires, Denmark and Sweden fought a war neither side truly wanted.The Dano-Swedish War of 1808–1809 was a reluctant conflict born from the Napoleonic Wars. Forced into opposing alliances, Sweden sought to seize Norway while Denmark attempted to …
Cauliflower is a flower head frozen before it could bloomThe white 'curd' we eat is a dense mass of undeveloped flower buds, an arrested inflorescence that arose around 2,500 years ago. Genomic work suggests it branched off from broccol…
Cause, manner and mechanism of death are three different questionsDeath certificates in Britain and the United States separate three things. The cause is the disease or injury, such as cancer. The mechanism is the final physiological failure, su…
Cavalier began as a Parliamentarian insult before royalists proudly adopted itIn June 1642, Parliament used the word Cavaliers to condemn the swaggering men around Charles I. The king's party turned the jibe into a badge of honour and answered by calling th…
Cavalry rebuilt Oyo after eighty years of exileA Yoruba inland power in what is now western Nigeria and Benin became West Africa's most populous kingdom, then nearly vanished when Nupe armies sacked its capital around 1535. Ex…
Cavendish's leftover bubble of air turned out to be argon, a century laterIn 1785 Henry Cavendish stripped oxygen and nitrogen from a sample of air and found a tiny bubble that refused to react. He had not made a mistake. More than a hundred years later…
Cavour helped unify Italy without ever really planning toCount Camillo Cavour is remembered as a chief architect of a united Italy, yet his goal for most of his career was more modest: enlarge Piedmont by annexing Lombardy and Venetia. …
Cayenne: The South American Capital That Functions as a Piece of FranceAs the largest Francophone city on the South American continent, Cayenne is a unique cultural crossroads. Located on the Atlantic coast, this French overseas department capital bl…
Cayuga Lake is a deep, glacially carved Finger Lake with a mysterious, storied past.Spanning three New York counties, Cayuga Lake is the longest and second-largest of the Finger Lakes. Beyond its role as a vital water source and recreational hub, the lake is stee…
Ceará: The Brazilian state that pioneered abolition and battles a cycle of droughtCeará is a land of dramatic contrasts, where sandy coastal plains meet rugged highlands. Beyond its famous beaches and tropical fruits, the state holds a unique place in history a…
Ceaușescu began as a reformer cheered for defying Moscow, then ruled Romania by fearIn August 1968 Nicolae Ceaușescu stood up and condemned the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Romanians loved him for it. Two decades later his own people chased him fro…
Cebu is where Magellan's voyage around the world lost MagellanIn April 1521 Ferdinand Magellan planted a wooden cross on Cebu's shore and saw the local ruler Rajah Humabon baptised with about 400 of his people. Less than two weeks later Mage…
Cecil B. DeMille shot Hollywood's first full-length feature, then ruled the box officeIn 1914 a former stage actor named Cecil B. DeMille made The Squaw Man, the first feature-length film shot in Hollywood. Its success helped turn a Los Angeles suburb into the capi…
Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 epic split the screen between ancient Exodus and modern morality.Before sound transformed cinema, Cecil B. DeMille captivated audiences with a bold structural experiment. His 1923 silent masterpiece, The Ten Commandments, juxtaposed the grand, …
Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 epic was the most expensive film ever made at its release.Before it became a perennial television staple, The Ten Commandments was a monumental production that redefined the biblical epic. Driven by a director who saw the story as a time…- Cecil Beaton: The Photographer Who Shaped the Public Image of the British MonarchyCecil Beaton was more than a photographer; he was a master of artifice who defined mid-century glamour. From capturing the Blitz to designing Oscar-winning costumes for My Fair La…
Cecil Taylor treated the piano like eighty-eight tuned drums to redefine jazz improvisation.Cecil Taylor was not just a pianist; he was a force of nature who approached the instrument with the physical intensity of a percussionist. By abandoning conventional structures f…
Cecilia Payne found what stars are made of and was told to hedgeIn 1925 a doctoral student at Radcliffe, Cecilia Payne, showed that stars consist mostly of hydrogen and helium, nothing like Earth's rocky make-up. The result seemed so unlikely …
Cecily Neville: The Matriarch Who Narrowly Missed Becoming England's Queen ConsortAs the mother of two kings, Edward IV and Richard III, Cecily Neville stood at the epicenter of the Wars of the Roses. Though she never wore the crown herself, she remained a form…
Cedar has been prized timber since the days of GilgameshNo conifer has a longer record of human use than the true cedar. For over 4,000 years its fragrant, rot-resistant wood built temples and palaces. Genetic studies now confirm that …
Cefalexin works by impersonating a building block of bacterial cell wallsFirst sold as Keflex in 1969, cefalexin is still among the most prescribed antibiotics, with over 7 million American prescriptions in 2023. Its trick is molecular mimicry: it rese…
Cefalù: A Sicilian coastal city built on layers of Greek, Arab, and Norman history.Perched on a precipitous rock, Cefalù has served as a fortress, a religious center, and a cinematic backdrop for centuries. From its ancient Siculian roots to its status as a UNES…