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Nature

2,233 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 12 of 38.

661. 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…
662. 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…
663. 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,…
664. 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.…
665. 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…
666. 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…
667. Ambergris, prized by perfumers for centuries, starts life as sperm whale wasteFresh from a sperm whale's gut, ambergris is soft, pale and smells like faeces. After months or years drifting in sunlight and salt water it hardens into a dark, waxy lump with a …
668. Spielberg named his production company after a $15,000 short about desert hitchhikersBefore Jaws, Steven Spielberg made Amblin', a short independent film about a man and a woman thumbing rides across the desert. It cost 15,000 dollars and won him directing work at…
669. Whip spiders walk on six legs and feel their way with two absurdly long whipsAmblypygids look like nightmares, flat-bodied arachnids with spiny grabbing arms and front legs stretched into feelers up to 60 centimetres long. Yet they have no venom and no sil…
670. Aldabra's giant tortoises graze so hard that the grass evolved to hideOn a remote Seychelles atoll, some 100,000 giant tortoises crop the vegetation so relentlessly that a distinct habitat called tortoise turf has formed. More than 20 grasses and he…
671. Alfalfa roots can dig more than 15 metres down to find waterA knee-high forage plant hides an astonishing root system. Alfalfa taproots usually reach two or three metres, can grow about six feet in a single year in loose soil, and sometime…
672. The British bird collector who helped found the Indian National CongressAllan Octavian Hume spent decades as a colonial official in India, amassed the largest collection of Indian bird skins anywhere, and then helped found the Indian National Congress…
673. Three versions of one gene sort almost everyone into four blood typesYour blood type comes down to which versions of a single gene you inherited. Classical genetics recognises three, called IA, IB and i, which combine into six possible pairings and…
674. Alabama does not mean Here We Rest, and its capital moved five timesA popular story says Alabama means Here We Rest, a translation first floated in an 1842 newspaper article. Specialists in Muskogean languages have found no support for it. The nam…
675. Albacore, the tuna that eats squid and never stops swimmingMost tuna hunt fish, but albacore mainly eat squid and their relatives, including a tiny deep-water species from the Atlantic and Mediterranean. They cannot rest, since they need …
676. A single quarry of 26 Albertosaurus hints that these tyrannosaurs lived in groupsIn 1910 Barnum Brown stumbled onto a quarry beside Alberta's Red Deer River crammed with the bones of one predator species. Later counts reached 26 Albertosaurus individuals at th…
677. White peacocks are not albinos, and neither is the ash-grey albino gaurPlenty of pale animals get called albino without deserving it. White peacocks, swans and geese carry a gene for white feathers rather than lacking melanin, and the so-called albin…
678. Every house cat descends from the African wildcat, first tamed around 10,000 years agoThe sandy, faintly striped African wildcat looks like a lean tabby, and that is no coincidence. Some of them were tamed in the Fertile Crescent about 10,000 years ago and became t…
679. Funnel weavers catch prey on webs that are not sticky at allThat flat sheet of silk draped over a hedge, with a tunnel leading into shadow, belongs to a funnel weaver. The web has no glue. It works by tangling and by vibration, and its own…
680. For decades writers claimed the Akan came from Egypt or the Sahara; archaeology says otherwiseColonial-era writers kept trying to trace Ghana's Akan people back to ancient Egypt, the Sahara or the Near East. When an anthropologist later rechecked one influential set of ora…
681. The Asian tiger mosquito bites by day and can breed in a bottle cap of waterMost mosquitoes are creatures of dusk and wetlands. The Asian tiger mosquito breaks both rules: it lives close to people, hunts in broad daylight, and its larvae can grow in under…
682. Aestivation is summer's version of hibernation, and snails, frogs and even lemurs do itHibernation gets all the attention, but plenty of living things sleep through summer instead. When heat and drought set in, snails glue themselves shut, frogs wrap up in mucus coc…
683. The African diaspora spans three slave trades, not one, plus modern migrationWhen people picture the African diaspora, they usually think of the Atlantic slave trade. But between 1500 and 1900, millions more Africans were forced north across the Sahara or …
684. More African spurred tortoises now live as pets than in the wildThe sulcata tortoise hatches at about the weight of a small egg and can grow past 100 kilograms. It is the biggest tortoise on any mainland, digging burrows up to 15 metres deep t…
685. The donkey's wild ancestor is down to about 570 animalsDonkeys number in the millions, but their wild ancestor is one of the rarest large mammals in Africa. Only about 570 African wild asses remain, scattered across the deserts of Eri…
686. No two African wild dogs share a coat, and conservationists want to rename themEvery African wild dog wears a unique patchwork of black, brown, yellow and white, often different on each side of its body, and pack mates can pick each other out at up to 100 me…
687. Beijing doubled its subway and pulled cars off roads for its 2008 OlympicsTo stage its first Olympic Games, Beijing added seven subway lines and 80 stations, opened a vast new airport terminal and ordered drivers off the road on alternate days by licenc…
688. The aardwolf is a hyena that licks up termites instead of huntingIt looks like a small, skinny striped hyena and belongs to the same family, yet the aardwolf has no interest in killing anything bigger than a beetle. Each night it can lap up 250…
689. Botanists fought for years over who gets to keep the name AcaciaThe word acacia first described an African tree growing in Roman Egypt. Today it belongs mostly to Australian wattles, after a bitter botanical dispute that ended in 2005 and was …
690. From an 85-gram kite to a 14-kilogram vulture, one family of raptorsThe tiny pearl kite weighs about 85 grams. The cinereous vulture can reach 14 kilograms, with wings spanning more than three metres. Both belong to the Accipitridae, a family of 2…
691. Falcons look like hawks but are closer kin to parrotsFor generations, falcons and hawks were filed together as one order of daytime raptors. Then a 2008 DNA study showed falcons are more closely related to parrots and songbirds. The…
692. Admiral began as an Arabic title, and it lost its tailWestern navies borrowed their top rank from Arabic. Admiral traces back to amir, a commander or prince, plus al, meaning the; the fuller phrase Amir al-Bahr means prince of the se…
693. Bread moulds were the first fungi shown to use sex hormonesSome pin moulds cannot reproduce sexually alone. Two strains, labelled plus and minus, must find each other, and they do it by chemistry: each releases compounds the other finishe…
694. Walnut shells once cleaned Army aircraft parts, until one grounded a helicopterGround walnut shells made a cheap, gentle grit for blasting grime off United States Army aviation parts. Then investigators of a fatal Chinook crash in Mannheim on 11 September 19…
695. Walruses use their tusks to haul out of the sea, not to digThe walrus's scientific name, Odobenus, joins Greek words for tooth and walk, because observers watched the animals heave themselves onto ice with their tusks. Those tusks, grown …
696. Early watermelons were bitter, pale and grown mainly as portable waterThe first watermelons were not the sweet red slices of today. Their pale, bitter flesh was hard to open, and people valued them for storing water through the dry season. In the Ka…
697. Farmers may have domesticated wheat without meaning toWild wheat ears shatter when ripe, scattering their grains. Stalks with tougher ears held on until harvest, so each season early farmers unknowingly resowed more of them. That acc…
698. A single twig from a parcel may explain England's weeping willowsThe poet Alexander Pope, the story goes, begged a twig from the bundle binding a parcel sent from Spain to Lady Suffolk and planted it. It thrived, and legend says every weeping w…
699. True yams were domesticated three separate times on three continentsPeople in Africa, Asia and South America each tamed their own yam, independently. Today about 95 percent of the world's crop grows in Africa, where tubers of up to 25 kilograms ar…
700. Yeast colonies survived for millennia inside ancient Israeli beer jarsResearchers examining drinking vessels from sites in Israel, some around 5,000 years old, found living yeast colonies still inside them. It was the first direct biological proof t…
701. Darwin called the yucca and its moth the most wonderful pollination knownA female yucca moth does something few animals do: she pollinates on purpose. Using tentacle-like mouthparts, she gathers pollen, packs it onto a yucca flower's stigma and then la…
702. The zucchini is an American squash reinvented in nineteenth-century MilanSquashes were first domesticated in Mexico and Central America more than 7,000 years ago, yet the slim green zucchini is a surprisingly recent invention. Northern Italian growers …
703. Medieval knights carried thyme for courage and sleepers hid it under pillowsEgyptians used thyme in embalming, Greeks burned it in temples believing it gave courage, and medieval women handed sprigs to knights for the same reason. Today its main oil, thym…
704. Linnaeus saw Roman battle trophies in the humble garden nasturtiumWhen Carl Linnaeus named the nasturtium genus Tropaeolum, its round leaves reminded him of shields and its red flowers of helmets, like the trophy poles Romans hung with captured …
705. Truffles hide underground and rely on hungry animals to spread their sporesA truffle cannot use wind or rain to scatter its spores, because it fruits below the soil. Instead, when ripe, it releases a smell that draws squirrels, voles, deer and people. It…
706. A virus painted the streaked tulips that drove Dutch buyers wildThe feathered, flame-streaked tulips that fetched fortunes during the Dutch tulip mania of 1634 to 1637 owed their beauty to disease. An aphid-borne mosaic virus suppressed one pi…
707. The humble turnip began in Central Asia and ended up on coats of armsGenetic studies place the first edible turnips in Central Asia several thousand years ago, where varieties remain the most diverse. From there the root spread west and east, fed G…
708. Cattails fed Ice Age Europeans and kept Second World War sailors afloatStarch grains left on grinding stones show Europeans eating cattail rhizomes 30,000 years ago. Much later the United States Navy stuffed life vests with cattail down in place of k…
709. A twelve-year-old on Réunion cracked the secret that made vanilla globalVanilla vines taken from Mexico grew happily in European hothouses and French colonies but refused to bear pods. In 1841 Edmond Albius, a twelve-year-old enslaved boy on Réunion, …
710. Vervain spent millennia as a sacred herb before settling into flower bedsEgyptians called vervain the tears of Isis, Greeks later named it for Hera, and Romans laid it on Jupiter's altars. Across much of Europe its names still link it to iron. Today th…
711. Broad beans have fed farmers for over ten thousand yearsCharred beans from three Neolithic villages in Lower Galilee, dated by radiocarbon, suggest farmers were growing broad beans as early as 8250 BCE. Nobody has found the plant's wil…
712. Violets hide a scent trick and a backup plan for making seedsSniff a sweet violet and the perfume seems to vanish almost at once. A scent compound called ionone briefly numbs the nose's receptors, so nothing more registers until they recove…
713. Marigolds colour European pasta and mark Mexico's Day of the DeadThe flowers English speakers call marigolds, genus Tagetes, come from Mexico and Central America, where the Nahua knew them as cempōhualxōchitl. Today their petals supply a yellow…
714. Tamarind, the 'Indian date', actually comes from the African savannaIts name comes from Arabic for Indian date, and it has grown in India so long that people assume it is native there. In fact the tamarind tree was domesticated in the dry savannas…
715. Most dandelions reproduce without sex, cloning themselves into thousands of microspeciesMany dandelions set seed with no pollination at all, producing offspring genetically identical to the parent. Every distinct clone can count as its own microspecies, which is why …
716. Taro is one of the few crops that thrives standing in floodwaterAlong with rice and lotus, taro can grow in flooded fields, and paddy-grown plants yield roughly double the dry-land crop. Humans may have been exploiting this starchy corm for te…
717. Each tarsier eyeball can be as big as its entire brainA tarsier's eyes are about 16 millimetres across, each as large as its brain or larger. Since the eyes cannot swivel, the tiny primate turns its head 180 degrees each way to see a…
718. Terriers are literally earth dogs, bred to chase vermin undergroundThe word terrier comes through Old French from the Latin for earth, because these small, wiry, fearless dogs were bred to follow rats and foxes into burrows. Today most are family…
719. Of all the tea family's plants, only a few actually contain caffeineThe tea family, Theaceae, includes showy camellias, American trees and the bush that gives us tea. Yet caffeine turns up only in one small section of Camellia, and the tea bush's …
720. Nearly every male Thoroughbred descends from one Arabian stallion imported in 1704Every modern Thoroughbred traces back to three stallions shipped to England between the 1680s and 1729. One genetic study found that about 95 percent of male Thoroughbreds carry t…

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