Intellect PlusPhysical geography
1,174 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 13 of 20.
India's Central Province holds its biggest diamond and copper reservesMadhya Pradesh literally means central province, and it sits squarely in the heart of India, bordered by five other states. It is the country's second largest by area, home to ove…
Matthew Arnold wrote Dover Beach while inspecting schools from railway waiting roomsTo afford marriage, the poet Matthew Arnold took a job as a school inspector in 1851 and kept it for 35 years. He called the work drudgery, but constant rail travel meant he saw m…
The man who named Australia was found under a London station in 2019Matthew Flinders first sailed around mainland Australia and popularised its name, calling it kinder to the ear than Terra Australis. Then the French held him captive for over six …
Antarctica's biggest town once ran on its own small nuclear reactorFrom 1962 to 1972, McMurdo Station on Ross Island drew electricity from a portable nuclear plant that also turned seawater into roughly 14,000 gallons of fresh water a day. Today …
In Mecklenburg you needed the grand duke's permission to marry until 1918Long after other German states dropped such rules, people in Mecklenburg still had to ask their grand duke before marrying or emigrating, and in the late nineteenth century he per…
Why California, Chile, Cape Town and Perth share the Mediterranean's weatherWine country in California, Chile, South Africa and Australia shares a pattern with the shores of the Mediterranean: rainy, mild winters and long, parched summers. The cause is a …
The world's rarest seal learned to hide its pups in sea cavesMediterranean monk seals once lounged and gave birth on open beaches from the Black Sea to the Azores. Hunted, netted and crowded out, the survivors retreated into remote caves wi…
Menorca changed hands between Britain, France and Spain four times in a centuryThe smaller of the two big Balearic islands, Menorca simply means lesser island in Latin. Its sheltered harbour at Mahon made it a prize: British, French and Spanish flags swapped…
Maltese is an Arabic-born language written only in the Latin alphabetMaltese grew from the Arabic spoken in medieval Sicily, yet it has never been written in Arabic script. It is the European Union's only official Semitic language, and a Maltese sp…
Money laundering moves dirty cash through three stages: placement, layering and integrationAl Capone went down for tax evasion, so gangsters started paying their taxes, and law enforcement needed new tools. Those tools became anti-money-laundering rules, aimed at the pr…
Pine nuts are naked seeds, not nuts, and a pinyon cone needs two summersBotanically a pine nut is not a nut at all. Pines are gymnosperms, from the Greek for naked seed, so their seeds sit bare instead of inside a fruit. Of all the pine species, only …
The pink fairy armadillo, the smallest of its kind, swims through sandAt 90 to 115 millimetres long and about 120 grams, the pink fairy armadillo is the smallest armadillo alive. It lives only in the dry scrub and dunes of central Argentina and can …
A Smoky Mountains town grew around a school founded with $15,000 of church moneyIn 1910 a survey ranked Sevier County as the part of Tennessee most in need of schools. A Methodist minister answered with a nearly free school in the Smokies, and the town that g…
Greenwich became longitude zero partly because most of the world's sea charts already used itIn 1884, delegates from twenty-six countries met in Washington, D.C., to settle on a single starting line for longitude. Greenwich won, largely because the United States already b…
Messina, named for its sickle-shaped harbour, keeps rebuilding after repeated catastrophesThe Sicels who founded the city in 757 BC called it Zancle, their word for sickle, after the curve of its natural harbour. Since then Messina, on the strait between Sicily and the…
Around six million years ago the Mediterranean Sea very nearly dried upRoughly 5.96 million years ago the forerunner of the Strait of Gibraltar closed, cutting the Mediterranean off from the Atlantic. Evaporation did the rest, shrinking the sea into …
At the North Pole the Sun rises once a year and circles overhead for monthsAt the poles the Sun rises and sets just once a year, at the equinoxes. For six months it circles the sky, spiralling higher until the summer solstice and then sinking again. Movi…
Miyagi's Matsushima Bay, dotted with 260 pine-clad islets, ranks among Japan's three great viewsOff the coast of Miyagi Prefecture, some 260 small islands covered in pine trees crowd Matsushima Bay, a scene counted among the Three Views of Japan. The same Pacific shoreline t…
The name Poles goes back to a tribe named for flat landPoles call themselves Polacy, after the Western Polans, a tribe that settled around the Warta River from the sixth century. Their name traces to an ancient root meaning flat, fitt…
Potassium chloride feeds crops, calibrates radiation detectors and once fought firesPotassium chloride looks and tastes a lot like table salt, and some people sprinkle it on food. But most of it ends up in fields as potash fertiliser, and a trace of natural radio…
The Potomac's name comes from a village, and its upper reaches meant honking geesePotomac is a European spelling of Patawomeck, an Algonquian village on the river's southern bank. Native peoples used separate names for different stretches: above Great Falls it …
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…
Pliny's pine-tree cloud gave the most explosive volcanoes their nameOn 24 August in AD 79, a woman urged Pliny the Elder to look at a strange cloud rising across the Bay of Naples. Her son later compared it to a pine tree, a tall trunk spreading i…
Plymouth is the only capital in the world that nobody lives inPlymouth is still, on paper, the capital of Montserrat, a British territory in the Caribbean. But since 1997 it has been an ash-covered ghost town, buried by the Soufrière Hills v…- Poaching began as a clash over who owned the right to huntFor much of history a poacher was a hungry peasant taking game the nobility claimed for itself. Under William the Conqueror's forest laws, a commoner hunting in a royal forest cou…
- To build India's Polavaram dam, engineers moved the Godavari River sidewaysThe riverbed at Polavaram in Andhra Pradesh is deep sand, too soft to hold a spillway. So engineers shifted the whole Godavari about 6.6 km towards its right bank and built there …
For ancient Greeks, the polis was not a city but the entire homelandTranslating polis as city misses its meaning. For an ancient Greek, the polis was the native land itself, with its own constitution and a claim on supreme loyalty. Greece was not …
One Indonesian province still has a hereditary sultan as its governorIndonesian governors are normally elected for five years and limited to two terms. Yogyakarta is different: its governor is the reigning sultan, Hamengkubuwono, and his deputy is …
A Philippine province's income decides how many lawmakers sit on its boardIn the Philippines, how much a province earns shapes its politics. Richer provinces get ten elected members on their provincial board, the poorest get six. Voters even approved a …- Deadhorse, Alaska counted 1,310 residents and not a single householdThe 2020 census found 1,310 people living at Prudhoe Bay, also called Deadhorse, on Alaska's Arctic coast. It also found zero households, one vacant housing unit and roughly ten m…
Kazakhstan's constitution carved out a special exception for its first presidentKazakhstan limits its presidents to two consecutive terms, except for one man. A clause in the constitution exempted the country's first leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who held the…
Filipinos still argue over who counts as their first presidentOfficially, the Philippines' first president was Emilio Aguinaldo, inaugurated in 1899. But historians, a city council, House lawmakers and a descendant of the revolutionary André…
Privateers were licensed raiders, and one missing document could turn them into piratesFor centuries a government could hand a private shipowner a paper called a letter of marque and send him to seize enemy cargo for profit. With the paper he was a patriot sharing p…
Biblical prophets often preached through strange public performances rather than wordsAccording to the Hebrew Bible, Jeremiah buried a linen belt until it rotted, smashed a clay jar before the elders and wore a wooden yoke around his neck. Ezekiel lay on his side f…
A thorny desert tree inspired villagers to give their lives defending itIn 1730 a Rajasthani maharaja sent men to cut khejri trees near Jodhpur for a new palace. Villagers led by Amrita Devi refused to let them, and 363 people died trying to protect t…
Argentina grew from 13 provinces to 23 over more than a centuryArgentina did not start with its present map. Thirteen provinces emerged from town councils during the independence wars, and much of the south and north-east was governed directl…
In one decade, Puerto Ricans identifying as white fell from 75.8 to 17.1 percentThe people of Puerto Rico did not change between 2010 and 2020, but the way they described themselves did. Three in four checked white on the 2010 census; ten years later fewer th…
Why some pumps will burst their own pipes if you close the valveClose the outlet on a centrifugal pump and it simply churns. Do the same to a positive-displacement pump and it keeps shoving fluid into the blocked line until the pipe ruptures o…- Punta Arenas strings ropes between buildings so pedestrians survive the windOn the Strait of Magellan, gusts can reach 130 km/h, so officials in Punta Arenas put up ropes between downtown buildings for people to hold. The Chilean city, founded as a penal …
Punta Cana was a nameless stretch of coast until two investors bought it in the 1960sIn the late 1960s the eastern tip of the Dominican Republic was undeveloped shoreline five hours' drive from the nearest city. A young Dominican entrepreneur and a New York labour…
Norway claimed Queen Maud Land five days before a German expedition arrivedOn 14 January 1939 Norway annexed a slice of Antarctica about the size of India. Five days later a German ship reached the pack ice offshore, and its aircraft began dropping swast…
The golden apples of Greek myth may really have been quincesHard, sour and gritty when raw, the quince hardly sounds like a legendary fruit. Yet the ancients called it a golden apple, dedicated it to Aphrodite and used it in wedding rites.…
Quirino province stayed beyond Spain's reach for most of the colonial eraThrough more than three centuries of Spanish rule in the Philippines, the jungle-clad hills that are now Quirino province stayed almost untouched. Spain sent a single military exp…
Radio Free Europe once sent 350,000 balloons of leaflets across the Iron CurtainBetween 1951 and 1956, Central European skies filled with weather balloons carrying more than 300 million leaflets, posters and books. They came from Radio Free Europe, a station …- Przemyśl's ring of 44 forts held off a Russian army for months in 1914Przemyśl sits in a natural gap between mountains and lowlands on the San River, which is why it has changed hands so often. Before the First World War, Austria ringed it with 44 f…
Public-private partnerships borrow privately, but taxpayers or users always pay the billA public-private partnership lets a company build and run a school, hospital or road up front, then collect payments for decades. It can look like free infrastructure. It is not: …
From willow ropes to spun wire: how suspension bridges learned to leapA suspension bridge turns every load into pull on its main cables, which is why it can leap farther than any other design. The idea is ancient, from rope bridges across chasms to …
The Sutlej, the river of a hundred courses that powers northern IndiaIn the Mahabharata, the sage Vasishtha leapt into a flooded Himalayan river, which mistook him for unquenchable fire and split into a hundred channels to avoid him. That legend ga…
The Swiss are a nation by choice, not by language or ethnicitySwitzerland has no single Swiss ethnicity or shared mother tongue. German, French, Italian and Romansh speakers make up its citizenry, bound together as a Willensnation, a nation …
How a salt town in upstate New York borrowed its name from SicilyIn 1820 a would-be post office town in central New York was refused the name Corinth because another village already had it. John Wilkinson, having read about Syracuse in Sicily, …
Syracuse University exists partly because Ezra Cornell was once cheated of his wagesSyracuse wanted Cornell University, and Andrew Dickson White pushed hard for the city. But Ezra Cornell had once been cheated of his wages as a young carpenter there, so he put hi…
Syriac, the Aramaic dialect that carried Christianity from Edessa to ChinaA local Aramaic dialect from the city of Edessa became, alongside Greek and Latin, one of the three great languages of early Christianity. Syriac-speaking churches carried it as f…
Tajik, the mountain Persian that kept words the rest of Iran lostTajik is Persian as spoken in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, close enough to Afghanistan's Dari to be mutually intelligible. Isolated in Central Asian mountains and exposed to Russian…
How mountains wring air dry and build deserts on their far sideMountains do not just block the wind; they strip it of water. Moist air forced up a range cools and dumps its rain on the windward slopes, then sinks, warms and dries out beyond t…
The crusader lord whose raids provoked Saladin into destroying Jerusalem's armyRaynald of Châtillon arrived in the Holy Land as a younger son of French nobility and married his way into ruling Antioch and later Transjordan. His raids on Muslim caravans and a…
The red fox, the most widely distributed carnivore species on the planetNo other member of the order Carnivora ranges as widely as the red fox. It spans the whole Northern Hemisphere, has moved into suburbs and cities, and after being introduced to Au…
Third World first meant politically unaligned, not poorWhen the French demographer Alfred Sauvy wrote of a third world in 1952, he was echoing the Third Estate of pre-revolutionary France: ignored and exploited commoners who wanted to…
Tampere grew rich on an 18-metre drop between two Finnish lakesTampere sits on a strip of land squeezed between Lake Näsijärvi and Lake Pyhäjärvi, whose surfaces differ by 18 metres. The rapids linking them, Tammerkoski, powered mills, a Scot…
The Tarim Basin's rivers flow inland and vanish in the desertMeltwater from the mountains ringing the Tarim Basin never reaches an ocean. Most rivers running north from the Kunlun die in the sand, and the Tarim River itself ends in the salt…
There is no such thing as a London 0207 numberLondoners often write their numbers as 0207 or 0208, but the area code is simply 020 and the local part has eight digits. The mistake is a fossil of two great renumberings. Britai…