Intellect Plus
Nature
2,233 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 10 of 38.
- Carrion crows and hooded crows share almost identical genes yet rarely interbreedAcross a line running through Europe, all-black carrion crows meet grey-bodied hooded crows. Sequencing their genomes showed the two are genetically the same except for a sliver u…
- The Caspian cobra is considered the most venomous cobra in the worldFor most of the twentieth century it was filed as just another population of the Indian cobra. Genetic work later showed the Caspian cobra is its own species, split off about 3.21…
- 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…
- A forgotten Permian extinction wiped out reefs millions of years before the Great DyingFor decades palaeontologists lumped it in with the catastrophe that ended the Permian. Only in 1994 did they recognise a separate collapse, some 259 million years ago, that may ha…
- Sheep, goats and musk oxen belong to one family that loves extreme terrainA grey goral barely a metre long and a musk ox that can top 650 kilograms in captivity are close relatives. Both belong to the caprines, the group that gave us sheep and goats, an…
- The caracal can leap three metres and snatch a bird out of the airA sandy wild cat with long black ear tufts, the caracal can spring more than three metres straight up and twist in mid-air to catch a bird in flight. Its name comes from a Turkish…
- The Carboniferous turned swamp forests into coal and let insects take flightMuch of the coal that powered the industrial age grew as swamp forest between about 359 and 299 million years ago. Geologists named the period for that coal, and it was also when …
- The carob tree lent its seeds' name to the jeweller's caratEvery diamond weighed in carats carries a trace of a Mediterranean tree. The word travelled through Arabic from the Greek for carob seed, meaning little horn. The same tree yields…
- Carpenter bees drill neat holes in timber but never eat the woodThat perfectly round hole, about 16 millimetres across, under a porch beam or garden bench is usually a carpenter bee's front door. The big, buzzing bee hovering nearby looks mena…
- Bill Watterson turned down fortunes to keep Calvin and Hobbes off lunchboxesAt its peak Calvin and Hobbes ran in more than 2,000 newspapers, and its syndicate was eager to sell plush tigers and cartoons. Bill Watterson fought for years to stop them, won c…
- Camels and llamas are North American animals that left homeCamels evolved in North America, starting as a rabbit-sized creature with four toes on each foot. For tens of millions of years they never left. Then some crossed into Asia and ot…
- The Canada lynx rises and falls with the snowshoe hareA Canada lynx is built around one prey animal. Its huge furry paws spread up to 10 centimetres across and hold nearly twice the weight a bobcat's can before sinking in snow, perfe…
- Seals, bears, skunks and raccoons all belong to the dog side of the familySplit the meat-eating mammals down the middle and you get cat-like carnivores on one side and dog-like ones on the other. The dog-like half, Caniformia, sweeps in not only wolves …
- The dire wolf was never really a wolfFor more than a century the dire wolf sat in the same genus as wolves, dogs and coyotes. Then a 2021 genetic study showed it belonged to an ancient American lineage that had split…
- Why so many animals eat their own kindMore than 1,500 animal species have been caught eating members of their own species, herbivores and scavengers included. It sounds like a freak behaviour, yet in lean times it can…
- Spanish fly was a beetle poison mistaken for a love potionMale blister beetles make a blistering chemical called cantharidin and hand it to females during mating as a gift. Humans ground the beetles into Spanish fly and sold it for centu…
- California sea lions swim with their front flippers and bend backwardsIn 2004 a perfectly healthy California sea lion turned up sitting on a road in Merced County, far from the sea. The species is curious, clever and unafraid of people once used to …
- Why a blue crab turns orange-red in the cooking potA live blue crab owes its colour to a pigment called alpha-crustacyanin that grips a red one, astaxanthin, and shifts it to greenish blue. Heat destroys the first pigment, leaving…
- Buffalo invented the grain elevator and fed the world through a canalUnloading grain from lake ships in 1840s Buffalo was back-breaking work done by hand for $1.50 a day. In 1843 a local inventor and an engineer adapted a steam-powered lift to scoo…
- Bugs Bunny was named after a director nicknamed BugsThe most famous rabbit in cartoons got his name almost by accident. An animator drawing a model sheet for director Ben Hardaway, known around the studio as Bugs, labelled it Bugs'…
- 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…
- The two-snake medical symbol really belongs to the god of merchantsMany American ambulances and clinics display a winged staff wrapped by two snakes. That emblem is the caduceus, the wand of Hermes, patron of trade, travellers and smooth talkers.…
- The crystal that doubles everything may have guided Viking shipsLook through a clear piece of calcite and every letter on the page beneath splits into two. That strange doubling may have helped Norse sailors find the sun behind cloud, and Icel…
- Brittle stars can split in half and choose any arm as the frontA brittle star has no head, so when it moves it simply picks one of its five arms to lead and rows with the other four. It can switch leaders whenever it turns. Some species go fu…
- The Texas border city that saw the Civil War's final battleMore than a month after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Union and Confederate troops were still fighting near Brownsville, Texas. The clash at Palmito Ranch on May 15, 18…
- Bryde's whales hid for decades inside whalers' sei whale catchesJapanese whalers now call it the look-alike whale. For years, animals landed off Japan and Brazil as sei whales turned out to be a different species entirely, betrayed by three ri…
- Bucknell University took its name from the trustee who rescued itFor its first four decades, this Pennsylvania college was simply the University at Lewisburg. Then, in 1881, facing financial ruin, it turned to one of its founding trustees, Will…
- The Arctic whale that headbutts ice and may live 200 yearsBowhead whales may outlive every other mammal, reaching more than 200 years. They spend their lives in Arctic and subarctic seas, smashing breathing holes through ice with a massi…
- Box jellyfish have real eyes, with lenses, and actively hunt fishMost jellyfish drift. Box jellyfish swim at up to two metres a second, turn 180 degrees in a few pulses, dodge obstacles and hunt small fish. They manage it without a brain in the…
- Brachiopods look like clams but lost the ancient seas to themPick up a brachiopod shell and you would swear it came from a clam. It did not. Brachiopods evolved their two-part shell independently, hinged top and bottom rather than left and …
- The spicy mustard plant that also pulls heavy metals out of soilBrown mustard seasons dishes from Punjab to Okinawa and gives its name to a condiment spicier than the yellow kind. The same plant also soaks up lead and cadmium from contaminated…
- Why a Utah campus teaches 63 languages to its studentsAt Brigham Young University in Provo, nearly half the students have lived outside the United States and about 65% speak a second language. Much of that comes from missionary servi…
- Salty water quietly supplies chlorine, iodine and much of our lithiumBrine sounds like something for pickles. Yet run an electric current through salt water and you get chlorine, caustic soda and hydrogen in one go. Iodine and bromine are wrung fro…
- The blue wildebeest turns most of its muscle energy into motionA blue wildebeest can gallop at 80 kilometres an hour and walk 80 kilometres over five days without a drink in heat reaching 38 °C. Its locomotor muscles convert 62.6% of their en…
- More mountain bongos may live in American zoos than in KenyaThe mountain bongo, a striped chestnut antelope from central Kenya, is critically endangered, with perhaps only about 100 left in the wild as of 2013. North American zoos hold ove…
- Genetics says the bison is really a kind of cattleTaxonomists long kept bison in a genus of their own, separate from cows, yaks and gaur. DNA studies in the 2010s broke that neat arrangement: both living bison species sit so deep…
- Male bowerbirds use forced perspective to win a mateSome male bowerbirds lay out objects in front of their bower from smallest to largest. Seen from where a visiting female stands, the arrangement creates an optical illusion that k…
- Doctors kept bleeding patients for two centuries after Harvey disproved the ideaFor over 2,000 years, draining blood was medicine's default treatment. William Harvey undercut its theory in 1628, and by the 1830s careful counting showed it did nothing for pneu…
- A blue-footed booby's feet are a health report its mate reads dailyThose famous turquoise feet are not just for show. Their colour depends on how well a booby has eaten in the past day or two, and potential partners watch closely. When researcher…
- Blue sharks steer straight for days, seemingly guided by Earth's magnetismOff the northeastern United States, tagged blue sharks have held a dead-straight course for hundreds of kilometres over several days, far out in open ocean with no landmarks. The …
- Bluefish keep attacking prey long after they seem to have eaten enoughThe bluefish is the last surviving member of its entire family, and it hunts like it has something to prove. Schools tear into baitfish in frenzies that carry on past the point of…
- The black-footed ferret was declared extinct in 1979, then found alive on a Wyoming ranchIn 1979 the black-footed ferret was written off as extinct. Two years later a small surviving population turned up near Meeteetse, Wyoming. Captive breeding from those few animals…
- The black mamba is neither black nor as fast or aggressive as legend claimsLook at a black mamba and you will see olive, khaki, gunmetal or brown, almost never black. The name comes from the inside of its mouth, a bluish-black lining it flashes when alar…
- Black rhinos are not black, and white rhinos may owe their name to a mistranslationNeither of Africa's rhinos is the colour its name suggests. The black rhino ranges from brown to grey, and the white rhino's name is often traced to a Dutch-derived word for wide,…
- Black vultures cool off, stay clean and find dinner with surprising tricksThe American black vulture has no voice box, so it can only grunt and hiss. It has a poor sense of smell, so it tails turkey vultures, whose noses are keen, to find carcasses. And…
- Termites are, genetically speaking, a branch of the cockroach family treeTermites once had an insect order all to themselves. DNA changed that: they evolved from inside the cockroach lineage, so biologists now file both in one order, Blattodea. Their c…
- A bored military policeman built the first maximum-containment lab cabinetLabs that handle dangerous microbes are graded from biosafety level 1, where handwashing may suffice, to level 4, with sealed suits and airlocks. The first maximum-containment cab…
- A Civil War plot to spread yellow fever failed because nobody knew about mosquitoesIn 1864 a Confederate agent shipped trunks of clothing from yellow fever victims in Bermuda toward Northern cities, hoping to start epidemics. The scheme was hopeless: the disease…
- A bird's entire skeleton makes up only about 5 percent of its weightFlight demands a body that is both feather-light and tough enough to survive take-offs and landings. Birds manage it with hollow, strut-braced bones, fused bone clusters and a too…
- Fishing cormorants in China refused to work after their seventh fishOn the Li River, fishermen let their cormorants eat every eighth catch. Once a bird had delivered seven, it simply stopped, ignoring commands and even shoves until its neck ring w…
- Twitchers are named after one nervous British birdwatcher from the 1950sSerious rare-bird chasers in Britain are called twitchers, a word coined in the 1950s for the jittery behaviour of a birdwatcher named Howard Medhurst. Their world has its own sla…
- Africa's smallest wild cat can kill 14 animals in a single nightThe black-footed cat weighs barely two kilograms and stands under 25 centimetres at the shoulder, yet it is a formidable night hunter. Radio-tracked individuals roam up to 16 kilo…
- India's blackbuck survives on Texas ranches and Argentine plains tooThe blackbuck, a striking Indian antelope with spiralling horns and a two-tone coat, crashed in numbers during the 20th century and vanished from Pakistan and Bangladesh. Yet ranc…
- A low-budget documentary helped end SeaWorld's killer whale breeding programmeBlackfish, a 2013 documentary about a captive orca named Tilikum, earned only about two million dollars at the box office. Its impact was far larger: bands cancelled park concerts…
- A sickly boy who could barely lift his head became yoga's global guruB. K. S. Iyengar was born during the influenza pandemic and spent his childhood battling malaria, tuberculosis and typhoid, so frail he had to lift his drooping head by effort. Yo…
- Four big cats can roar, but the snow leopard lacks the vocal equipmentA lion's roar can carry 8 to 10 kilometres on a good night, thanks to the longest larynx of any cat. Its relatives the tiger, leopard and jaguar roar too. The snow leopard shares …
- A bighorn ram's horns can weigh as much as all its bonesTwo bighorn rams walk apart, turn, rear up and crash their heads together, again and again, before the autumn rut. Their curled horns can weigh 14 kilograms, as much as the rest o…
- Billfish slash through fish schools with bills, then circle back to feedA sailfish has been clocked at 110 kilometres an hour in a short burst, close to a cheetah's top speed and the fastest ever recorded for a fish. Its relatives the marlins and the …
- Biltong is not jerky: South Africa's dried meat never meets heatAsk a South African about beef jerky and you may get a lecture. Biltong, their cured meat snack, is soaked in vinegar and spices and then simply hung in cool, dry air for days. Je…
- Bimini, 80 kilometres from Miami, drew Hemingway, rum-runners and shark scientistsThe closest slice of the Bahamas to the United States sits just 80 kilometres east of Miami. That proximity made Bimini a Prohibition supply depot for rum-runners, a marlin-fishin…