Intellect Plus
Nature
2,227 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 11 of 38.
- The basking shark strains an ocean's worth of water through a metre-wide mouthA basking shark cruises with its jaws gaping open, at walking pace, sieving plankton from the sea. A five-metre individual has been calculated to push some 450 tonnes of water thr…
- Harmless animals that bluff their way to safety by dressing as poisonHenry Walter Bates spent over a decade collecting butterflies along the Amazon and found some he could not tell apart by their wings, even though closer study showed they were not…
- A bird's beak is bone wrapped in ever-growing keratin, with hidden tricksA kiwi breathes through nostrils at the very tip of its bill, sniffing out food in the soil. Gannets have no outer nostrils at all and breathe through their mouths. Beaks look sim…
- DNA tests found most beefalo contain no detectable buffalo at allBeefalo is sold as a cattle-bison hybrid, officially three-eighths bison. Yet when geneticists sequenced 47 animals in 2024, including samples from the founding herd, 39 showed no…
- The Kosi, a river older than the Himalayas that keeps jumping its banksThe Kosi flowed before the Himalayas rose, and it has cut its gorge deeper as the mountains lifted around it. Downstream it drags so much silt onto the plains of Bihar that it aba…
- A barnacle is a crustacean glued head-first to a rock, kicking food into its mouthLinnaeus filed barnacles with snails and clams. It took an Irish naturalist watching their larvae in 1830 to show they are crustaceans, cousins of crabs, that spend adult life cem…
- Whalebone is not bone at all, but the stuff of fingernailsSome whales feed through a curtain of plates hanging from the upper jaw, each up to 3.5 metres long and fringed with bristles. People called it whalebone, but it is keratin, the s…
- The banteng is a critically endangered wild ox that also lives on as Bali cattleIn the forests of Java and Cambodia roams a wild ox with a white rump patch, where bulls turn nearly black and cows stay chestnut. Its wild numbers have more than halved in recent…
- Why some lizards snap off their own tails, and what it costs themGrab a skink by the tail and you may be left holding a twitching decoy while its owner scuttles away. Dropping a body part to escape a predator, called autotomy, has evolved at le…
- The ankle joint that unites pigeons, pterosaurs and Tyrannosaurus in one familyEvery bird at your feeder belongs to a lineage that also produced the giant dinosaurs and the leathery-winged pterosaurs. Palaeontologists call it Avemetatarsalia, meaning bird me…
- Badgers are not really one kind of animal, just a body plan built for diggingThe European badger, the honey badger and the American badger look like close cousins, but biologists say the name describes a lifestyle rather than a family tree. Badgers are squ…
- The bald eagle has a full head of feathers, and builds a one-ton nestAmerica's national bird is not bald at all. Its name uses an old sense of the word meaning white-headed, the same idea behind its scientific name, which translates as white-headed…
- Baldr's death was the first domino in the Norse end of the worldBaldr, son of Odin and Frigg, owned the finest ship ever built and a hall more beautiful than any other. Yet the Norse remembered him chiefly for dying. Icelandic poems treat his …
- The biggest animals ever to live eat by straining the sea through their mouthsThe blue whale can reach 31 metres and 190 tonnes, larger than any animal known to have existed, and it lives on some of the smallest prey in the ocean. Like the other 15 baleen w…
- Deadly nightshade's poison, atropine, became a nerve agent antidoteThe same compound that makes deadly nightshade dangerous is carried by soldiers in autoinjectors to survive nerve gas. Atropine, first isolated in 1833 and now counted by the WHO …
- Australia Zoo grew from a two-acre reptile park run by Steve Irwin's parentsIn 1970 Bob and Lyn Irwin opened a two-acre wildlife park in Beerwah, Queensland, with lace monitors, tiger snakes, freshwater crocodiles and kangaroos. Their son Steve grew up fe…
- Australia holds the world's only wild herds of one-humped camelsThe world's only dromedary camels living truly wild are not in Arabia but in the Australian outback. Brought in during the 1800s to haul goods across the desert, they were turned …
- Funnel-web venom devastates primates yet barely troubles many other animalsAustralian funnel-web spiders rank among the most medically dangerous spiders on Earth, yet their venom seems fairly harmless to many animals. Primates, humans included, are the u…
- Australian magpies remember faces, and may spare the people they knowEvery spring a small number of Australian magpies, nearly always males, swoop at anyone who strays near their nests. Yet the same birds can recognise at least 100 individual peopl…
- Atlantic bluefin tuna heat their own muscles to hunt in cold seasFew fish run warm, but the Atlantic bluefin tuna controls its body temperature better than any other. A heat-trading web of blood vessels keeps its swimming muscles warm, letting …
- When Atlantic cod vanished, lobsters, crabs and shrimp took over the seafloorIn 1992 Canada banned cod fishing after a thousand years of Europeans chasing the fish across the Atlantic. Several stocks had crashed by more than 95 per cent, and even without f…
- The horseshoe crab is no crab, has nine eyes and bleeds blueIts species name honours Polyphemus, the one-eyed giant, because early naturalists thought it had a single eye. The Atlantic horseshoe crab actually has nine, plus light sensors a…
- Atlantic salmon surf ocean currents home rather than swimming marathonsThe image of salmon swimming thousands of kilometres across the ocean is largely a myth. Atlantic salmon ride sea surface currents in a loop that carries them back toward the rive…
- Sea squirt larvae swim like tadpoles, then glue themselves down for lifeA young sea squirt has a muscular tail, a nerve cord and a notochord, the hallmarks that link it to animals with backbones. Within a day or so it presses its head to a rock, secre…
- Microbes named after Norse gods may hold the origin of complex cellsMud near an Arctic hydrothermal vent called Loki's Castle yielded genomes of microbes carrying proteins once thought unique to cells with nuclei. Named for Loki, then joined by re…
- The moon bear is the most upright walker in the whole bear familyNamed for the pale crescent on its chest, the Asian black bear can stroll on its hind legs for more than 400 metres, farther than any other bear. Its upper body is so strong that …
- North America hunted down the world's largest hornet and declared it eradicatedWhen the world's biggest hornet turned up near the Canada–US border in 2019, identification centres in the eastern United States were flooded with photos and samples. Not one was …
- Robber flies grow a bristly moustache to shield their faces from struggling preyEvery one of the 7,000-plus robber fly species is a predator. They perch at lookout points, launch at passing insects, grab them in midair and tackle dragonflies, grasshoppers and…
- Why lobsters turn red in the pot and farmed salmon flesh looks pinkA live lobster is dull because its red pigment, astaxanthin, is locked onto shell proteins. Heat unravels those proteins, the pigment breaks free, and the shell blushes. The same …
- Atavisms are ancestral traits that resurface after silent genes switch back onBabies are occasionally born with a small tail, wingless stick insects sometimes sprout wings again, and chicken embryos have been coaxed into growing teeth. These throwbacks, cal…
- Ascension Island's cloud forest was planted on a cinder at Darwin's urgingWhen Charles Darwin landed in 1836, Ascension was a treeless volcanic island that St Helena's residents mocked as a cinder. A decade later Joseph Hooker, spurred by Darwin, persua…
- The first recorded artificial insemination, in 1784, was performed on a dogIn 1784 the Italian scientist Lazzaro Spallanzani achieved a pregnancy in a dog without mating, the first recorded artificial insemination. Six years later the Scottish surgeon Jo…
- Turtles are closer kin to birds and crocodiles than to lizardsGenetic studies keep reaching the same surprising verdict: a turtle's nearest living relatives are birds and crocodilians, not lizards and snakes. Biologists named that grouping A…
- This fish shoots insects off leaves and corrects for light bendingArcherfish knock insects off overhanging plants with a jet of water spat from a grooved mouth, reaching prey up to about 3 metres above the surface. Adults nearly always hit on th…
- Crocodiles and birds are the last survivors of the ruling reptilesA pigeon and a crocodile look nothing alike, yet they are each other's closest living relatives. Both belong to the archosaurs, the group that also produced dinosaurs and pterosau…
- The Argentine tegu is a lizard that warms its own body when breedingReptiles are supposed to rely on the sun for warmth, but during the breeding season the Argentine black and white tegu generates some of its own heat. It is the only known reptile…
- Hera's many-eyed watchman ended up as the pattern on a peacock's tailArgus Panoptes, the all-seeing giant of Greek myth, never let every eye close at once, which made him the ideal guard for Io, a priestess Zeus had turned into a heifer. Hermes lul…
- The largest land arthropod ever was a millipede longer than a personAround 300 million years ago, a millipede called Arthropleura crawled through open woodland in Europe and North America, reaching at least 2 metres long and leaving trackways half…
- Nine zoo animals in Arizona helped bring the Arabian oryx back from extinctionThe last wild Arabian oryx was reported in 1972, after decades of hunting from cars. A decade earlier, a captive herd had been started at the Phoenix Zoo with just nine animals. I…
- Shakespeare lifted his most dazzling Cleopatra lines from a translation of a translationShakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, first staged around 1607, draws on Thomas North's 1579 English version of Plutarch, which itself came via a French translation. Some of the pla…
- Two ant movies in one autumn, and the feud that came with themIn 1998 two computer-animated films about a misfit worker ant winning a princess reached cinemas about a month apart. DreamWorks released Antz first; Pixar's A Bug's Life followed…
- Oysters, ginseng and whale gut: why most love potions work mainly through beliefPeople have chased substances to kindle desire for thousands of years, from Hindu verses of around 2000 to 1000 BCE to Chinese texts older still. The word comes from Aphrodite, Gr…
- Darwin asked why caterpillars are so gaudy, and Wallace answered the next dayIn February 1867 Charles Darwin was stumped: why are some caterpillars so beautifully coloured when they are too young to attract mates? Alfred Russel Wallace wrote back the next …
- Ducks and geese belong to one of the few bird lines that outlived the dinosaursWhen the asteroid ended the age of dinosaurs, it flattened forests and wiped out the tree-dwelling toothed birds that then ruled the skies. The ancestors of ducks, geese and swans…
- The Antarctic ends at a shifting line in the sea, not at the coastThe Antarctic is more than the frozen continent. Its natural border is the Antarctic Convergence, a band of ocean roughly 32 to 48 km wide where frigid southern water meets warmer…
- Why older allergy pills make you drowsy and newer ones mostly don'tHistamine, the chemical behind a runny nose and watery eyes, also helps keep the brain alert. Early antihistamines slipped easily into the brain, which is why some were even used …
- Anaphylaxis is the immune system's alarm going off everywhere at onceIts name combines Greek words for up and protection, yet anaphylaxis is defence gone badly wrong. Within minutes of meeting a trigger such as a peanut, a bee sting or penicillin, …
- Ducks, geese and swans belong to one ancient and surprisingly varied familyFrom a cotton pygmy goose weighing about 164 grams to a trumpeter swan of up to 17.2 kilograms, the waterfowl family Anatidae spans a huge size range. Its roughly 174 species live…
- The Andean condor can soar for hours while barely flapping its giant wingsCharles Darwin watched Andean condors for half an hour without seeing one beat its wings. Modern flight recorders agree: these huge vultures flap only about 1 percent of the time …
- The anhinga swims like a snake and must hang its wings out to dryWhen an anhinga swims, only its slim neck shows above the surface, looking like a snake about to strike. The Tupi people of Brazil called it the devil bird or snake bird, and Engl…
- How bats and whales build pictures of the world out of echoesIn experiments by J. A. Simmons, bats relying on sweeping calls could tell apart two targets placed less than half a millimetre apart, using nothing but returning sound. Toothed w…
- The green anole is no chameleon, but its colour still tells a storyPeople across the American South call the green anole a chameleon, yet it is closer kin to iguanas. Its ancestors rafted from Cuba to the mainland millions of years ago, an unusua…
- The American woodcock sees all around itself and flies slower than any birdNicknamed the timberdoodle, the American woodcock is a sandpiper that ditched the beach for damp thickets. Its eyes sit so high on its head that it can probably see a full circle …
- The egg that let backboned animals leave the water for goodFrogs must return to ponds to breed, but lizards, birds and people never have to. The difference traces back to amniotes, a group whose embryos float inside a protective sac of fl…
- An alligator's bite is crushing, yet a strip of tape can hold its jaws shutAdult American alligators once held the record for the strongest bite ever measured in a laboratory, up to 13,172 newtons. The muscles that open their jaws, though, are so weak th…
- American badgers and coyotes sometimes hunt as a team, trapping squirrels between themA ground squirrel that spots a coyote dives into its burrow. One that sees a badger does the opposite, bolting out to outrun the slow digger. So when a badger and a coyote hunt to…
- Florida's other big reptile is a salt-loving crocodile, not an alligatorIn 1875 William Temple Hornaday went to Florida to collect alligator hides and chased a rumoured big old gator at the head of Biscayne Bay. When he found it, grey and whale-sized,…
- The American goldfinch waits until late July to nest, when thistle seed peaksMost North American birds are finished breeding by midsummer, but the American goldfinch barely starts before late July. Almost nothing else native to the continent nests so late.…
- The pistol shrimp's claw snaps a bubble that flashes light and stuns fishA shrimp only 3 to 5 centimetres long rivals sperm whales and belugas for the title of loudest animal in the sea. Its oversized claw snaps shut so fast it blows a collapsing bubbl…
- The Amazon's pink dolphins get their colour from scrapes, not from their dietAmazon river dolphins are born dark grey and only turn pink as adults, as years of abrasion wear their skin. Males, which fight more, end up pinker and scarred. They can turn thei…