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Nature

2,233 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 14 of 38.

781. The deadly poinsettia myth began with a 1919 rumourMany people believe a single poinsettia leaf can kill a child. It can't. The scare traces back to a 1919 urban legend, later repeated in a book and even an FDA newsletter. Researc…
782. The hand grenade and the garnet both take their names from pomegranatesThe modern French word for pomegranate, grenade, gave its name to the military explosive, and the deep red garnet likely owes its name to the fruit's pulp too. The pomegranate its…
783. Europe had beans long before the common bean arrived from the AmericasThe beans ancient Greeks and Romans ate were Asian species, unrelated to the common bean whose seeds and green pods fill markets today. When Phaseolus vulgaris crossed the Atlanti…
784. Some philodendron flowers heat up, burning oxygen as fast as hummingbirds doDuring flowering, some philodendrons warm the central spike of their bloom in three separate peaks. The heat stirs up beetles sheltering inside, spreads scent into the air and may…
785. Some pine cones stay sealed for years until a wildfire melts them openCertain pines, including Pinus radiata, lock their cones shut with resin and hold their seeds for years. Only the heat of a forest fire melts the seal. The seeds then drop onto fr…
786. Hawaii barred imported hummingbirds to keep its pineapples free of seedsWild pineapples rely mostly on hummingbirds for pollination, but pollinated fruit develops seeds, and seeds spoil the eating quality. So in Hawaii, where pineapples were grown and…
787. Seals are cousins of weasels, raccoons and red pandasSeals, sea lions and walruses look like a world apart from land carnivores, yet their nearest living relatives are the musteloids: weasels, raccoons, skunks and red pandas. The tw…
788. For Aristotle, anything alive that was not an animal counted as a plantThe ancient Greek scheme was simple: living things with a sensitive soul were animals, and those with only a vegetative soul were plants. Under that view the plant kingdom swept i…
789. The London plane thrives in cities, though its relatives prefer riverbanksMost plane trees grow wild along rivers and in wetlands, yet one hybrid, the London plane, has turned out to be remarkably tough in cities. It lines streets in London and across t…
790. A single-celled paramecium backs up and tries again when it hits somethingBump a paramecium into an obstacle and the hairlike cilia covering it reverse their power stroke, sending it swimming backwards for a moment before it sets off again at a new angl…
791. Paranthropus had a gorilla-style skull crest on a small, upright bodyThe robust australopithecines had huge jaws, broad grinding teeth and a bony ridge along the top of the skull that anchored powerful chewing muscles. Below the neck they were smal…
792. Parsley's name means rock celery, and the root goes back to Linear BBehind the word parsley sits the Greek petroselinon, rock celery. The celery half, selinon, is ancient enough to appear in Mycenaean Greek as se-ri-no, written in the Linear B scr…
793. Before cane sugar reached Europe, the humble parsnip served as a sweetenerParsnips taste sweeter than carrots, and they get sweeter still if left in the ground through winter frosts. That natural sugar made them useful in Europe as a sweetener before ca…
794. The word pea exists because English speakers misread pease as pluralEnglish originally had the noun pease, as in pease pudding. Because it ended in an s sound, speakers assumed it must be plural and trimmed it to make a singular: pea. Linguists ca…
795. The peach carries Persia in its name but was domesticated in ChinaIts scientific name, Prunus persica, points to Persia, and that is where Europeans first got the tree. But peaches were domesticated much further east, in Neolithic China. China s…
796. A peanut flower pushes its fertilised ovary into the soil to ripenAfter a peanut flower is fertilised, a stalk at the base of its ovary lengthens into a thin peg that grows down into the ground. The pod then develops underground, a habit called …
797. The fleshy part of a pear is swollen stalk, not the true fruitBite into a pear and most of what you eat is the swollen tip of the flower stalk. The true fruit is the gritty core in the middle, two to five tough chambers holding the seeds. Bo…
798. In 1927, pecan growers tried to settle the pronunciation argument by decreeAmericans have never agreed on how to say pecan, even within the same region. In 1927 the National Pecan Growers Association tried to end the debate, declaring the official pronun…
799. The English word oil once meant only one thing: olive oilOil comes from the Latin oleum, olive oil, and in many languages the word for oil traces back to this single tree. People on Morocco's Atlantic coast were using olives around 100,…
800. Nobody has ever found the common onion growing truly wildThe common onion is the most widely grown member of its genus, yet it is known only from cultivation; its wild ancestor has never been identified. Its nearest living relatives gro…
801. The organism behind potato blight looks like a fungus but is closer to seaweedLate blight of potato and sudden oak death are caused by oomycetes, microbes long filed with the fungi because they grow in the same threadlike way. Molecular studies moved them n…
802. Every sweet orange descends from a single ancient cross of pomelo and mandarinThe sweet orange is not a wild fruit. It arose in domestication in East Asia from one cross between a pomelo hybrid and a mandarin, and every variety since, from navels to blood o…
803. Most orchid flowers twist upside down as they open, and for good reasonAs a typical orchid bud develops, it rotates a full 180 degrees, a move called resupination. The result puts the showy lip petal beneath the flower's central column, where it can …
804. Deepwater rice carries genes called SNORKEL that help it outgrow floodsWhen floodwater rises, some rice plants race it. In deepwater varieties, two genes named SNORKEL1 and SNORKEL2 trigger rapid stretching of the stem segments, keeping leaves above …
805. The screw pine is neither a pine nor, despite appearances, a palmPandanus trees go by names like screw pine and pandanus palm, yet they are not closely related to either. They are monocots propped on thick stilt roots, crowned with strap-like l…
806. Papaya looks like a tree but is really a giant herbA papaya plant can reach 10 metres, with a scarred trunk and a crown of huge lobed leaves, yet botanists class it as a large herbaceous plant rather than a tree. It usually grows …
807. Okra's scientific name means edible father of muskCrush an okra seed and it gives off a sweet, musky scent, which is probably why its genus name, Abelmoschus, comes from Arabic for father of musk. The species name simply means ed…
808. Baboons are closer kin to you than to South American monkeysOld World monkeys split from the ancestors of apes, including us, between 25 and 30 million years ago. Their shared lineage parted from New World monkeys far earlier, some 45 to 5…
809. Olives, ash trees, lilac and jasmine all belong to one ancient familyThe tree that gives us olive oil, the ash prized for tough timber, and garden favourites such as lilac, forsythia and privet are all cousins. The olive family, Oleaceae, stretches…
810. A muskrat can stay underwater for up to 17 minutesLike seals and whales, muskrats tolerate a buildup of carbon dioxide better than most mammals, letting them swim submerged for 12 to 17 minutes. They seal their ears against water…
811. Cloves, guava, allspice and the world's tallest flowering plant are all myrtle relativesThe myrtle family ranges from spice-rack staples like clove and allspice to fruit such as guava and feijoa, and to Eucalyptus regnans, the tallest flowering plant on Earth. Every …
812. Lotus flowers heat themselves, and their leaves shed water like glassLotus leaves are so water-repellent that droplets touch them at a single tiny point and roll away at the slightest tilt, a phenomenon now called the lotus effect. The flowers also…
813. South America's monkeys probably arrived from Africa on floating rafts of vegetationAbout 40 million years ago the ancestors of marmosets, capuchins and howlers were in Africa. The leading theory holds that some drifted across a narrower Atlantic on mats of plant…
814. One tree gives two spices: nutmeg from the seed and mace from its red wrapperCrack open the fruit of the true nutmeg tree and you find a seed wrapped in a crimson lace. Dry the seed for months and it becomes nutmeg; flatten and dry the lace for two weeks a…
815. Nutria have bright orange teeth, stained by iron in their enamelThe nutria, or coypu, is a big South American water rodent with orange-yellow incisors coloured by iron, webbed hind feet and teats placed high on the female's sides so young can …
816. Oak trees feed more than 950 kinds of caterpillarOaks are keystone trees, hosting over 950 caterpillar species, swarms of gall wasps and partnerships with fungi including truffles. One Bulgarian oak is estimated at 1,637 years o…
817. Oats probably slipped into farming by looking like other cerealsEarly cultivators seem to have gathered oat seeds along with other cereals because they looked so alike, and the hitchhiker became a crop in its own right. Oats dislike harsh wint…
818. By the logic of family trees, apes and humans are monkeys tooApes sit deep inside the monkey family tree: any ape is more closely related to baboons and macaques than South American monkeys are. So if a group should include all descendants …
819. Rice, wheat, bananas, orchids and palm trees all share a one-leaf beginningMonocots sprout with a single embryonic leaf, and this one group of over 70,000 species supplies most of the plant mass farmers grow. Grasses alone cover more than 40 percent of E…
820. The fig family spans a billionfold range, from forest-sized banyans to thumbnail succulentsOne Indian banyan can spread over two hectares. Its relative Dorstenia barnimiana is a stemless bulb a few centimetres wide carrying a single leaf. Both belong to the Moraceae, th…
821. White, red and black mulberries are named for their buds, not their fruitThe three best-known mulberries take their colour names from dormant buds, so a white mulberry can bear dark fruit. Fruit colour and leaf shape are useless for telling species apa…
822. Mosses soak up billions of tons of carbon a year without roots or seedsMosses have no flowers, seeds or true roots, and their leaves are often a single cell thick. Yet these small plants absorb an estimated 6.4 billion tons of carbon every year, hold…
823. Mice do not especially crave cheese, but they do make facesThe cartoon mouse chasing cheese is mostly myth: mice prefer sweet, high-calorie carbohydrates and eat cheese only when nothing better is around. Meanwhile, scientists at the Max …
824. The Hittites paid three times more for a mule than for a fine horseMules, the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse, were prized long before cars and tractors. In Hittite Anatolia one cost three good horses, and Sumerians valued them at s…
825. No murid rodent is native to the Americas, yet house mice live everywhereThe murid family of mice, rats and gerbils holds around 870 species, making it the largest or second-largest mammal family. None evolved in the Americas, but the house mouse and b…
826. Leave a mushroom cap on paper overnight and it prints its own fingerprintSet a sporulating mushroom cap gill-side down overnight and it drops a powdery pattern called a spore print. Its colour, usually white, sometimes brown, black, pink or yellow but …
827. Moles stockpile paralysed earthworms in underground larders, sometimes over a thousand at onceA mole's saliva carries a toxin that paralyses earthworms, so it can keep them alive but helpless for later meals. Researchers have dug up larders holding more than a thousand wor…
828. Herodotus's gold-digging ants may really have been Himalayan marmotsThe Greek historian Herodotus told of giant ants that dug up gold. The explorer Michel Peissel argued the tale grew from golden marmots on Pakistan's Deosai Plateau, whose burrows…
829. One botanist named 434 new mints in five years; most were not realMints cross-breed so freely that botanists have published more than 3,000 names for them. Between 1911 and 1916 one taxonomist described 434 new kinds from central Europe alone. T…
830. Smuggling a merino sheep out of Spain could once cost you your lifeFor centuries Spain guarded its fine-wooled merino sheep so jealously that exporting one was a capital crime. Then kings began giving flocks away as diplomatic presents, and in 17…
831. Millet is not one crop but a grab bag of only distantly related grassesPearl millet, finger millet, proso, fonio and Job's tears all share a name, yet they come from different tribes and even different subfamilies of grasses. What unites them is smal…
832. Hawaii's macadamia industry may trace back to a single Australian treeIn 2019, geneticists compared hundreds of wild Queensland macadamias with Hawaiian orchard trees and found that nearly all the Hawaiian crop descends from a small group near Gympi…
833. After humans, no primate genus has spread as widely as the macaquesFrom Japan's snowy mountains to Gibraltar's rock and a Florida river, macaques range farther than any primate except us. They eat fruit, raid crops, pocket food in their cheeks an…
834. Avocado, black pepper, nutmeg and cinnamon all belong to one ancient plant groupYour spice rack and your guacamole share a family secret. Avocado, black pepper, nutmeg, cinnamon, bay laurel and the magnolia tree all belong to the magnoliids, a branch of flowe…
835. Nobody agrees where the word mahogany came from, Bahamas or West AfricaMahogany became Georgian Britain's luxury furniture wood, with imports soaring from 525 tons in 1740 to over 30,000 by 1788. Yet the name is a puzzle. One scholar traced it to a B…
836. Chocolate, cotton, okra and durian are all members of the mallow familyA single plant family gives us chocolate from cacao, the cotton in our shirts, okra for gumbo, cola nuts, baobab fruit and the notoriously pungent durian. The mallows, Malvaceae, …
837. 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…
838. The Christmas stocking mandarin began as a New Year gift from JapanNorth Americans stuff mandarins into Christmas stockings thanks to Japanese immigrants in the 1880s, whose families shipped them the fruit for New Year. Trains with orange-painted…
839. Year-round mangoes owe everything to a Filipino farming trick involving smokeMango trees used to flower only every 16 to 18 months. In 1974 the Filipino horticulturist Ramon Barba turned a traditional smoke technique into a chemical spray that makes them b…
840. Canada's flag leaf has 11 points; a real sugar maple leaf has 23The maple leaf on Canada's flag is a simplified sugar maple leaf with eleven points, less than half the usual 23. Maples inspire engineers too: their spinning winged seeds were th…

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