Intellect PlusCards starting with S
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Sombr taught himself production on GarageBand before TikTok made him a star at 19Shane Boose started layering harmonies in GarageBand at the end of elementary school. In March 2025, two of his songs, Back to Friends and Undressed, took off on TikTok and climbe…
Some 'empires' gained the name without conquering a single acreWhen Korea proclaimed itself an empire in 1897, it was not expanding; Japan was about to swallow it. The Central African Empire and the Mexican Empire likewise owed the label main…
Some agaves wait 60 years to flower, then dieThe 'century plant' does not really take a century, but some agave varieties live 60 years before blooming. Then they throw up a flowering mast that can top 12 metres, set seed an…
Some American synagogues once held their Sabbath services on SundayReform Judaism began in 19th-century Germany as an attempt to fit an ancient faith to modern life. In the United States it went further than anyone in Europe dared: prayers almost…
Some animals hide by smell or sound, not only by colourTrained dogs and meerkats, both of which hunt by scent, struggle to find puff adders. The snake ambushes its meals and must stay hidden from its own enemies too, so it seems to ma…
Some animals survive by stealing body heat from their neighbors in a process called kleptothermy.Ectotherms like snakes and lizards cannot generate their own internal heat, so they often rely on the environment. But some have evolved a clever shortcut: they move into the nest…
Some animals survive extreme conditions by essentially turning their metabolism off until conditions improve.Bradymetabolism describes creatures capable of shifting between high active states and near-death resting states. By dramatically slowing their internal processes in response to t…
Some Antarctic ice has stayed frozen for close to a million yearsA snowflake landing today may melt within months, but water locked in glaciers and ice sheets can stay frozen for tens of thousands of years, and deep ice in parts of East Antarct…
Some ants win by blocking rivals' nest entrances with pebblesCompetition in nature is not always a head-on fight. The ant Novomessor cockerelli plugs the entrances of red harvester ant colonies with small rocks to stop them foraging, and ma…
Some bamboo shoots out almost a metre in a single dayBamboo is a grass, yet its giants reach 46 metres and weigh up to 450 kilograms. Certain species add 91 centimetres in a day, about a millimetre every 90 seconds. Stranger still, …
Some beach sand has passed through the gut of a fishNear coral reefs, fish that graze algae off rocks and coral swallow grit along with their food, digest the organic part and excrete the rest. Over a lifetime, a single fish can tu…
Some beetles grow larger than a human hand and weigh hundreds of gramsWhile many beetles like ladybirds are tiny, some species reach massive proportions. This video takes you behind the scenes at the Natural History Museum to explore the world of gi…
Some botflies hitch eggs onto mosquitoes to reach skinOestrid flies, known as bots, warbles, heel flies, and gadflies, raise their larvae inside mammal bodies. Only Dermatobia hominis routinely parasitizes people. Some species glue t…
Some Catholic priests may marry, if they belong to an Eastern churchThe Catholic Church is not one church but 24: the Latin Church plus 23 self-governing Eastern churches, all loyal to the pope yet running their own liturgies and laws. About 18 mi…
Some chicha is brewed with the help of human salivaAndean corn beer can be made the familiar way, by sprouting maize to free its sugars. But some brewers skip that step: they chew ground maize or cassava, and enzymes in saliva tur…
Some chisels are made of beryllium copper so they will never sparkAlmost every cold chisel for cutting metal is hardened steel. But where a single spark could be disastrous, toolmakers use beryllium copper instead. It is one of many small adapta…
Some chromosome rearrangements are completely harmless, as long as nothing goes missingA chunk of one chromosome can snap off and swap places with a piece of another, and the person carrying it may never notice. What matters is balance: if every gene is still presen…
Some cosmic events leave permanent, indelible marks on the fabric of spacetime itself.While standard gravitational waves ripple through the universe and vanish, certain gravitational tsunamis leave behind a lasting memory. This video explores the physics of these p…
Some cypresses wait for fire before they let their seeds goMany cypress species keep their seeds sealed inside cones for years, releasing them only after a fire kills the parent tree and clears the ground. One Tibetan species reaches abou…
Some damselfish are surprisingly sophisticated farmers that keep tiny shrimp as their personal petsDamselfish are far more than just colorful reef inhabitants. These small, territorial fish exhibit complex social structures, perform intricate courtship rituals, and even engage …
Some deep ocean water takes about a thousand years to resurfaceWarm Atlantic water flows north, cools, grows dense and sinks near the Arctic. From there it creeps through the deep basins of the world, and the oldest of it rises again in the N…
Some early Christians believed the archangel Michael and Christ were the same beingMichael is the warrior angel shared by Judaism, Christianity and Islam, famous for casting Satan out of heaven. Less known is that from the second century several Christian groups…
Some equations have no algorithm that always worksSolving an equation means finding values that make both sides equal when substituted for unknowns. Solutions may be numbers, functions, or infinite sets. Hilbert's tenth problem w…
Some European cave marks may predate modern humans entirelyParietal art—paint and engraving on cave walls—usually means deep prehistory. Nearly 350 painted caves are known in France and Spain alone. Dates keep shifting: Sulawesi pigs, Spa…- Some female fireflies fake a rival species' flashes to eat the malesFireflies are beetles, more than 2,400 described species of them, and their glow probably began as a warning that the larvae taste foul. Only later did it become a courtship signa…
Some fireflies use romantic light signals to lure and devour their own kindMost firefly flashes are a form of skywriting meant to attract mates. However, the femme fatale fireflies of the genus Photuris have evolved a darker strategy. They mimic the mati…
Some floods are deliberate, from rice paddies to wartime defencesMost floods are disasters, but people also drown land on purpose. Farmers flood paddies to grow rice, Dutch engineers designate fields to take a swollen river's overflow, and armi…
Some fungi fire their spores with an acceleration above 10,000 gMany fungi do not wait for the wind. Certain species launch single spores using a tiny water droplet, known as Buller's drop, that flings each one off at a starting acceleration t…
Some glands destroy their own cells to release oilA gland is a cell or organ that makes and releases substances an animal needs—into blood or onto a surface. Built mostly of epithelium with connective scaffolding, glands begin as…
Some historians argue that calling the Civil War North the Union concedes too muchFor generations, Americans have spoken of the Union versus the Confederacy. In 2015 historian Michael Landis argued the phrasing quietly accepts the secessionist view that the cou…
Some honeyguides lead people to wild beehivesIndicatoridae holds sixteen Old World piciform species, most in Africa and two in Asia. One or two deliberately guide humans to bee colonies, then feast on larvae and wax left beh…
Some huntsman spiders cartwheel down dunes, and one tick like a quartz clockIn Namibia's Namib desert, the wheel spider escapes by curling up and cartwheeling across the sand, while a relative, Cebrennus rechenbergi, flees using handsprings. Both belong t…
Some iconic fast food chains you assumed were gone are still in business today.Many famous restaurant brands have vanished over time, but some iconic burger joints and nostalgic chains remain operational. This episode explores these surprisingly resilient bu…
Some identity thieves steal a name just to dodge an arrestNot every identity thief wants your money. Some give a stolen name to police when they are arrested, so the charges land on someone else. The real person may only find out years l…
Some infinities are bigger than others, and Cantor labelled them with alephGeorg Cantor realised that infinite sets come in different sizes and named those sizes after the Hebrew letter aleph. The smallest, aleph-null, counts the natural numbers. Whether…
Some insomniacs sleep for hours yet swear they were awake all nightAt any given moment, somewhere from 10% to 30% of adults are living with insomnia, and up to half of people have it at some point in a year. Yet about 5% of sufferers have a stran…
Some lizard species have completely abandoned the need for two sexes to reproduce.Explore the surprising world of all-female lizard species. A senior curator from the Natural History Museum explains how these unique animals evolved and reproduce without males, …- Some massive stars vanish into black holes without the expected supernova explosionAstronomers have observed a massive star simply disappear from view, suggesting it collapsed directly into a black hole. This phenomenon, dubbed a failed supernova, challenges the…
Some materialists doubt that beliefs, as we picture them, exist at allMaterialism says matter comes first and mind arises from it, but its boldest modern form goes further. Paul and Patricia Churchland argued that some everyday mental notions may be…
Some of Earth's oldest surviving rock is banded gneiss over four billion years oldOn an island about 300 kilometres north of Yellowknife in Canada sits the Acasta Gneiss, metamorphosed between 3.58 and 4.031 billion years ago and among the most ancient intact p…- Some of Earth’s oldest rock still floors Canada’s lake countryThe Canadian Shield—also Laurentian Shield or Plateau—exposes Precambrian igneous and high-grade metamorphic rock that cores the North American Craton, Laurentia. Ages from about …
Some of Felix Mendelssohn's published songs were really written by his sisterFanny Mendelssohn wrote over 450 works, yet most went unpublished while she lived, and six of her songs appeared under her brother Felix's name. Social rules and family doubts kep…
Some of humanity's oldest board games have survived without any written rule books.Archaeologists are working to reconstruct the rules of ancient pastimes like Senet and Patolli. This video explores how experts decipher the mechanics of games that predate iconic…
Some of humanity's oldest literature may describe volcanoes erupting 34,000 years agoLiterature comes from the Latin for letter, yet much of it was never written down. Aboriginal Gunditjmara stories from south-western Victoria tell of volcanic eruptions, and a 202…
Some of the brightest galaxies were first catalogued as flickering local starsAstronomers once listed several objects as irregular variable stars inside the Milky Way, brightening and fading without pattern. They turned out to be colossal galaxies billions …
Some of the earliest Afrikaans writing used Arabic script, not Latin lettersFrom about 1815, Muslim schools at the Cape began teaching in Afrikaans instead of Malay, writing it in Arabic letters. Those lessons are among the oldest known Afrikaans texts, p…
Some of the mud on the ocean floor fell from outer spaceSeafloor sediment comes from four sources: eroded land, the shells of dead plankton, chemical reactions in seawater, and space. That last, cosmogenous material settles alongside t…
Some of the world's centenarians may exist only on pension paperworkUnited Nations estimates of people aged 100 or more have soared, from 23,000 in 1950 to 935,000 in 2024. But research that won a 2024 Ig Nobel Prize argues the figures are inflate…
Some of the world's largest water basins never reach the ocean at allMost rivers eventually find the sea, but endorheic basins are different. These closed systems trap water in inland sinks, where it can only escape through evaporation or seepage. …
Some of the world's most scenic vacation spots hide a violent historyMany popular travel destinations, from tranquil beaches to historic sites, were once the scenes of brutal conflict. This video explores how places like Normandy and Sparta have tr…
Some of this actually happened: The blurred lines of the Abscam-inspired American HustleDavid O. Russell’s 2013 film American Hustle dramatizes the FBI’s Abscam operation of the late 1970s and early 1980s. While the film earned critical acclaim and ten Oscar nominati…
Some organisms survive for millennia by entering states that defy traditional definitions of life.What constitutes a living individual? From ancient nematodes revived after 46,000 years in permafrost to clonal colonies spanning thousands of acres, nature challenges our biologi…
Some pathogens hide inside your body for years before they finally cause illness.Your immune system is a powerful defender, but certain viruses and bacteria have evolved to evade detection. This video examines pathogens that remain dormant within the human bod…
Some people are born with extra organs, but what does that mean for them?Being born with additional body parts is more common than you might think. This video explores the biological reality of having bonus organs, ranging from extra spleens to double …
Some people can raise goose bumps at will, and most never realise it's rareA small, unmeasured share of people can summon goose bumps on command, with no cold, fear or music to trigger them. The knack seems to be inborn rather than learned, tends to go w…- Some people cannot visualize images in their minds at allWhen asked to imagine a scene, most people conjure a mental picture. For others, the mind remains blank. This video explores aphantasia, a condition where individuals are unable t…
Some people feel emotions but cannot find words for themAlexithymia, sometimes called emotional blindness, is not an absence of feeling. People with it may know they feel bad, yet struggle to tell sadness from anger, or an emotion from…
Some people hear colors or taste words: inside the world of synesthesiaSynesthesia is a fascinating neurological trait where stimulating one sense triggers an automatic, involuntary experience in another. Whether it is seeing music as vibrant colors …
Some people with swallowing trouble inhale food without ever coughingDysphagia simply means difficulty swallowing, but it can be surprisingly hard to spot. Some people have little awareness of the problem, and some aspirate food or drink into the l…
Some permafrost has stayed frozen for around 700,000 yearsPermafrost is ground that stays below freezing for at least two years running, and the oldest has been frozen for roughly 700,000 years. It underlies about 11 percent of the world…