Intellect PlusCards starting with W
29,907 cards. Page 497 of 499.
Wolfgang Köhler watched chimpanzees stack crates and saw insight, not trial and errorOn Tenerife during the First World War, a German psychologist hung bananas out of reach and watched chimpanzees pile up wooden boxes to climb to them. Wolfgang Köhler concluded th…
Wolfgang Pauli, the physicist whose mere presence supposedly broke equipmentColleagues joked that laboratory apparatus failed whenever Wolfgang Pauli walked nearby, and he loved the reputation. The Austrian theorist was also the sharpest critic in physics…
Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival: A Medieval Masterpiece of Chivalry, Spirituality, and Hidden OriginsComposed in the 13th century, this Middle High German romance follows the Arthurian hero Parzival on a transformative quest for the Holy Grail. Beyond its knightly adventures, the…
Wolfsburg: The German industrial powerhouse built from scratch to house a car factoryUnlike most German cities, Wolfsburg lacks a medieval center. Founded in 1938 as a planned town for Volkswagen workers, it evolved from a site of wartime forced labor into a moder…
Wolseley's Impossible March: Forging the Narrative of CanadaIn the nascent days of Canadian confederation, a single, arduous military march through the wilderness proved pivotal. Garnet Wolseley led a contingent of 1000 soldiers on a journ…
Wolverhampton grew from a noblewoman's land grant into a Midlands industrial cityIn 985 a king handed land to a woman called Wulfrun, and the settlement that grew there still carries her name. Wolverhampton went on to trade wool, forge locks, build more than 2…
Woman has nothing to do with womb: the word began as wife-personOld English speakers used mann to mean simply a person, of either sex. A female adult was a wifmann, a wife-person, while a male one was a wer. After the Norman Conquest mann narr…
Wombats produce cube-shaped poo, and explaining it won a physics prize.An adult wombat leaves 80 to 100 neat little cubes of dung a night, which it uses to mark its territory. How a soft, rounded gut produces flat-sided droppings puzzled people for y…
Women have fought on the front lines of history's most defining global conflicts.This documentary explores the lives of female warriors who participated in combat throughout history. From the English Civil War to modern conflicts in the Middle East, these wome…
Women played a cricket World Cup two years before the men didThe first Cricket World Cup was not a men's event. Two years before the men's inaugural tournament, a women's competition in England organised by Jack Hayward featured Young Engla…
Women voted on Pitcairn Island decades before most of the world's capitalsFrom 1838, the female descendants of the Bounty mutineers on tiny Pitcairn Island could vote, and they kept that right when the community resettled on Norfolk Island in 1856. Such…
Women's football was once more popular than the men's game before being banned.In the 1920s, women's football matches drew crowds exceeding 50,000 spectators. Yet, citing concerns over the game's masculinity and financial control, the English Football Associ…
Wonder of the Seas: A floating city of extremes and complex maritime engineeringSpanning 1,188 feet with a gross tonnage exceeding 236,000, Wonder of the Seas represents a pinnacle of modern cruise ship construction. Beyond its sheer scale, this Oasis-class v…
Wonder Woman began as psychological propaganda for loveHer creator was a polygraph inventor who believed comics could teach a new kind of power. Wonder Woman would win not with fists but with love, and his partner told him the hero ha…
Wonderland's author was Oxford's mathematical donCharles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832–1898), pen name Lewis Carroll, taught math at Christ Church while inventing Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Wordplay, logic puzzles, and literary …
Wong Kar-wai made his breakthrough film while killing time on a delayed epicStuck on a troubled martial arts epic and waiting two months for sound equipment, a stressed Wong Kar-wai decided to shoot something small to enjoy filmmaking again. He treated it…- Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 is a visually stunning, melancholy meditation on memory and unrequited love.A loose sequel to In the Mood for Love, this 2004 romantic drama follows a writer navigating his past through non-chronological storytelling. Spanning four years of production, th…
Wonju: A strategic basin city that evolved from historic capital to modern industrial hubLocated in a rare flat basin within the mountainous Gangwon province, Wonju has served as a vital crossroads for centuries. Once the provincial capital during the Joseon era, this…
Wonsan endured the longest siege in modern American naval historyFrom March 1951 until 27 July 1953, United States warships besieged and shelled the North Korean port of Wonsan without letup, the longest such siege in modern American naval hist…
Wood chips are a versatile gardening resource if you understand how to manage them.Charles Dowding explains how to assess, stack, and age various types of wood chips to improve your soil and garden. This video explores the wide variability of wood chip quality a…
Wood ferns are ancient survivors that have been evolving for 100 million yearsKnown as wood ferns, the Dryopteridaceae family is a cosmopolitan group of about 1,700 species. These resilient plants have thrived since the Mid-Cretaceous, adapting to terrestri…
Wood frogs survive the winter by turning their own blood into a swamp slushyWhile most animals rely on thick fur or huddling to endure freezing temperatures, the wood frog employs a far more radical strategy. These amphibians possess the extraordinary abi…
Wood-plastic composites offer durability, but they are not the perfect replacement for natural lumber.Wood-plastic composites blend wood fibers with thermoplastics to create versatile building materials. While they resist rot and require less maintenance than traditional wood, the…
Woodlice are land crustaceans, not lice at allOniscidean isopods nicknamed woodlice haunt damp wood yet are neither parasites nor insects. Molecular clocks suggest Paleozoic landfall, though the oldest fossils are mid-Cretace…
Woodpeckers drill timber almost everywhere except Australasia and MadagascarWoodpeckers, piculets, wrynecks, and sapsuckers form family Picidae within Piciformes, absent from Australia, New Guinea, New Zealand, and Madagascar. Drumming and chiseling mostl…
Woodrow Wilson was once a citizen of the ConfederacyWoodrow Wilson's earliest memory was hearing a passer-by in Georgia complain that Abraham Lincoln had won and war was coming. The son of a Confederate-supporting minister, he is o…
Woodrow Wilson won a Nobel for the League his own country refused to joinThe American president was hailed as the chief architect of the League of Nations and received the 1919 Peace Prize for it. Yet the United States never became a member. That absen…
Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points were an attempt to redefine global peace after the Great War.On January 8, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson presented fourteen specific principles to Congress to guide a post-war settlement. Moving beyond simple territorial disputes, he sough…
Woodwinds need not be wood—reeds and edges decideCall them woodwinds and many still imagine maple tubes, yet gold flutes and brass saxophones belong for how they speak. Sound either splits on a sharp edge—open transverse flutes,…
Woody Allen's Café Society captures the bittersweet ache of paths not taken in life.In 1930s Hollywood, a young man falls for his uncle's mistress, setting off a decades-long cycle of longing and regret. This 2016 romantic drama, shot on digital for the first tim…- Woody Allen’s 2009 comedy Whatever Works was actually written three decades earlier in the 1970s.When Woody Allen returned to New York City to film this cynical comedy, he dusted off a script originally penned in the 1970s. Though it stars Larry David as a misanthropic former…
Woody Harrelson once drew a chess game with Garry Kasparov, with some grandmaster helpIn Prague in 1999 an American actor sat down at the board against the reigning world chess champion and walked away with a draw. Woody Harrelson had company: several grandmasters …- Wool town that became Yorkshire’s private-sector engineLeeds, West Yorkshire’s largest settlement, grew from a thirteenth-century manor and sixteenth-century market into a wool powerhouse, winning city status from Queen Victoria in 18…
Woolf turned Bloomsbury talk into modernist interiorsAdeline Virginia Woolf (née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) helped invent modernist fiction’s stream of consciousness. After her father’s 1904 death she moved into bohem…
Woolly mammoths still roamed an Arctic island when Egypt was a kingdomMost woolly mammoths vanished from mainland Siberia around 10,000 years ago, but a stranded population hung on at Wrangel Island until about 4,000 years ago. Frozen carcasses, dun…- Woolly mammoths were still alive when the first Egyptian civilisation roseThe last mammoths did not vanish in some distant ice age. A population on Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Ocean, lasted until roughly 4,000 years ago, while early civilisations flou…
Worcester in 1651 closed England's civil wars with Parliament victoriousFrom 1642 to 1651, Royalists and Parliamentarians fought across England in wars nested inside the wider Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The first war ended in June 1646 with Charles I…
Word of the day: alacrityalacrity (noun): liveliness and eagerness.- Word of the day: aplombaplomb (noun): great coolness and composure under strain.
Word of the day: clandestineclandestine (adjective): conducted with or marked by hidden aims or methods.- Word of the day: denouementdenouement (noun): the outcome of a complex sequence of events.
Word of the day: euphoriaeuphoria (noun): a feeling of great (usually exaggerated) elation.- Word of the day: flabbergastedflabbergasted (adjective): as if struck dumb with astonishment and surprise.
- Word of the day: idyllicidyllic (adjective): excellent and delightful in all respects.
- Word of the day: jubilantjubilant (adjective): joyful and proud especially because of triumph or success.
- Word of the day: kerfufflekerfuffle (noun): a disorderly outburst or tumult.
- Word of the day: lacunalacuna (noun): a blank gap or missing part.
Word of the day: lagniappelagniappe (noun): a small gift (especially one given by a merchant to a customer who makes a purchase).- Word of the day: lugubriouslugubrious (adjective): excessively mournful.
Word of the day: obfuscateobfuscate (verb): make obscure or unclear.
Word of the day: palimpsestpalimpsest (noun): a manuscript (usually written on papyrus or parchment) on which more than one text has been written with the earlier writing incompletely erased and still visib…- Word of the day: pellucidpellucid (adjective): transmitting light; able to be seen through with clarity.
- Word of the day: plethoraplethora (noun): extreme excess.
- Word of the day: ramshackleramshackle (adjective): in deplorable condition.
- Word of the day: sesquipedaliansesquipedalian (adjective): given to the overuse of long words.
Word of the day: tenebroustenebrous (adjective): dark and gloomy.
Word of the day: zenithzenith (noun): the point above the observer that is directly opposite the nadir on the imaginary sphere against which celestial bodies appear to be projected.
Working out one sugar molecule helped earn a string of Nobel PrizesGlucose is life's main fuel, made from water and carbon dioxide by plants and burned by every organism. Understanding it proved so central to chemistry and medicine that it earned…
Workplace injuries claim hundreds of thousands of lives and millions of workdays annually worldwide.Beyond the immediate physical toll, occupational injuries represent a massive global economic burden. From the construction sites of the United States to the dairy farms of the Mi…
Workplace safety grew from mine fumes to global lawOccupational safety and health guards workers—and the public affected by workplaces—through medicine, hygiene, and promotion. United Nations estimates put annual work-related deat…