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Nature

2,227 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 3 of 38.

121. The vibrant crimson secret hiding in your favorite foodsThat bright red hue in your candy or yogurt might not be synthetic. It could come from the hemolymph of a tiny insect. Discover the history of the cochineal, a biological pigment …
122. How stingless bees defend their honey without a single stingerWith no stingers to repel intruders, over 600 species of bees across the tropics have developed ingenious alternatives. From chemical barriers to specialized bouncers, these tiny …
123. The house fly uses a hydraulic head to escape its pupal prisonBeyond the familiar buzz of a kitchen pest lies a biological transformation of startling intensity. To emerge from its hard casing, the house fly deploys a specialized, fluid-fill…
124. How a tiny fly survives the lethal trap of the La Brea Tar PitsIn the sticky, black asphalt of Los Angeles, life seems impossible. Most creatures are doomed the moment they touch the ooze. Yet, the petroleum fly has mastered this toxic landsc…
125. How a tiny amphibian masters the art of midair skydivingHigh in the canopy of California's redwoods, a small predator faces a vertical crisis. To escape hungry birds, the wandering salamander performs a daring feat of aerial acrobatics…
126. Nature’s undertakers use tiny hitchhikers to protect their nurseryBurying beetles perform a gruesome feat of parental care, dragging small carcasses underground to feed their young. But they don't work alone. A specialized group of microscopic m…
127. The miniature predators hiding in plain sight around your homeFrom the sawing mouthparts of mosquitoes to the harpoon-like hooks of ticks, tiny bloodsuckers use specialized biological tools to feed. Some carry deadly parasites, while others …
128. The solar-tracking secret behind the sunflower's massive bloomSunflowers are more than just bright garden ornaments; they are masters of timing. By tracking the sun's path across the sky, these plants prepare themselves to attract the bees e…
129. Beyond the sting: the diverse, specialized lives of the world's unique beesWhile honeybees are famous for their honey, they are far from the only specialists in the insect world. From bees that wear pollen pants to those that build mud fortresses, discov…
130. How a royal handwritten message celebrated a century of natural historyTo mark the 100th birthday of Sir David Attenborough, King Charles III shared a personal tribute. Delivered by a cast of British nature stars, the handwritten message honored a ma…
131. The hidden world beneath our feet is far more vulnerable than we imaginedDeep within the Earth's crust, an estimated 100,000 extraordinary species thrive in total isolation. From blind salamanders to superstrong spiders, these troglobites have evolved …
132. South Korea respelled its road signs so the internet could stop mangling KoreanThe older way of writing Korean in Latin letters relied on apostrophes and curved accent marks, which early internet users routinely dropped, making different sounds look identica…
133. Rhyolite, the stickiest lava on Earth, tends to explode rather than flowRhyolite holds more silica than any other volcanic rock, and that makes its molten form thick enough to trap gas until it bursts. So it usually leaves the ground as ash and pumice…
134. Expelled from Oxford, Richard Burton went on to master up to 29 languagesRichard Francis Burton got himself permanently thrown out of Oxford for lecturing the dons who had just lectured him. He then joined the army in India, passed six formal language …
135. Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil's gaucho state, is named for a river that isn't oneBrazil's southernmost state takes its name, Great River of the South, from a channel that is really the outlet of two huge coastal lagoons. Its cattle plains share gaucho culture …
136. The Rock of Gibraltar is an upside-down slab of Jurassic seabedAncient sailors treated this limestone mountain as one of the Pillars of Hercules, the edge of the known world. Geologists see something stranger: layers of seabed laid down some …
137. Rome ruled Egypt for nearly seven centuries as the emperor's private breadbasketAfter Cleopatra and Mark Antony died in 30 BC, Octavian treated Egypt as his own possession. For almost 700 years it fed the empire with grain and was its richest province outside…
138. Reinhold Messner climbed Everest without bottled oxygen when doctors said it was impossibleIn 1978 Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler stood on the summit of Everest breathing only the thin air around them, something several doctors and climbers had declared beyond human…
139. Indonesia has no state religion, yet for decades every ID card named oneThe country with the world's biggest Muslim population also built Borobudur, the largest Buddhist monument anywhere. Indonesia's founding philosophy asks citizens to believe in on…
140. South Korea's churches and temples multiplied after 1960, then began emptyingIn 1962 barely one South Korean in twenty called themselves Christian. By 2005 almost three in ten did, and Protestant churches had multiplied more than eightfold in under four de…
141. La Salle paddled to the Gulf of Mexico and claimed half a continent for FranceOn April 9, 1682, a French fur trader stood where the Mississippi meets the Gulf of Mexico and declared its entire drainage basin French territory, naming it La Louisiane after Lo…
142. ResearchGate became the busiest social network for scientists, and one of the most irritatingA virologist started ResearchGate in Boston in 2008, and it soon moved to Berlin with backing from Benchmark, Peter Thiel's fund and Bill Gates. Scientists flocked to it to share …
143. Saint Kitts grew only sugar for 365 years, then shut the industry downFrom 1640 until 2005, one crop ruled Saint Kitts. Farmers had abandoned tobacco because Virginia undercut them, and sugarcane took over, bringing enslaved Africans by the shipload…
144. Measuring how salty seawater is turns out to be surprisingly hardSeawater holds about 35 grams of salt per kilogram, and the Dead Sea over 200. Yet pinning down salinity precisely has required three successive measurement scales and a bottled r…
145. Hippos once wallowed in lakes in the middle of Arabia's Empty QuarterArabia's Empty Quarter is one of the driest places on Earth, with dunes reaching 250 metres. Yet hardened lake beds along its middle hold fossils of hippopotamus, water buffalo an…
146. A Russian fur company once built a fort in Hawaii and named Bodega BayRussia's first joint-stock company chased sea otter pelts from Alaska to Baja California. Along the way it renamed a California bay after its patron, stranded a crew among Olympic…
147. Most cars in Russia's Far East have the steering wheel on the wrong sideIn Russia's Far East, 73 percent of cars have right-hand drive, something unique within Russia, even though traffic keeps to the right. It suits a region that had no highway link …
148. The ruble was the world's first decimal currency, thanks to Peter the GreatIn 1704 Peter the Great decreed that one silver ruble would be worth 100 copper kopecks instead of the old 200 small Moscow coins. That tidy change made the ruble the first decima…
149. Africa's snowy Mountains of the Moon are losing their glaciers fastStraddling the equator between Uganda and Congo, the Rwenzori carry permanent snow and ice, and explorers once matched them to Ptolemy's legendary Mountains of the Moon at the Nil…
150. The hunt for sable fur helped push Russia all the way across SiberiaA small Siberian marten with fur that feels smooth whichever way you stroke it drove kings, khans and tsars to extravagance. One Russian diplomat compared it to the Golden Fleece,…
151. Nobody is quite sure who really discovered Saint Helena, or whenTradition says the Portuguese navigator João da Nova sighted Saint Helena on 21 May 1502. Yet a map finished months after his return omits it, sailors the next year treated it as …
152. Russian passports have used four different ways to spell names in Latin lettersA Russian traveller could have held passports spelling the same surname in several different ways. Soviet documents used French-style spelling, a new English-leaning scheme arrive…
153. Some Romansh speakers switch to Swiss German just to understand each otherSwitzerland's fourth national language has five regional written forms, and speakers from opposite ends of its territory often cannot follow one another at first. Rather than stru…
154. DNA showed Himalayan Skeleton Lake holds people who died a thousand years apartA shallow Himalayan lake at over 5,000 metres gives up hundreds of skeletons each summer when its ice melts. For decades everyone assumed a single deadly hailstorm had killed a ro…
155. California's largest lake was created by accident when an irrigation canal failedIn 1905, flood water on the Colorado River burst into an irrigation canal and did not stop. For about two years the whole river poured into a dry desert basin in Southern Californ…
156. The saltwater crocodile hatches at 71 grams and can end up past a tonneA newly hatched saltwater crocodile is about 28 cm long and weighs roughly 71 grams, less than a chocolate bar. A big male can grow past 6 metres and 1,000 kg, making this species…
157. Nobody is quite sure when the founder of Quebec was bornMonuments to Samuel de Champlain proudly carve 1567 as his birth year, a date now known to rest on faulty calculations. One historian argued for around 1580; in 2012 a genealogist…
158. Los Angeles is slowly sliding north along the San Andreas Fault toward San FranciscoWest of the San Andreas Fault, California rides the Pacific plate northwest by a few centimetres each year. Keep that up for perhaps twenty million years and Los Angeles will glid…
159. Santorini's famous cliffs are the rim of a drowned, still restless volcanoThe whitewashed villages tourists photograph on Santorini cling to 300-metre cliffs that are really the inner wall of a collapsed volcano. The sea now fills its crater, about 12 b…
160. Michigan's oldest city grew up where ships once had to be dragged overlandEarly vessels heading for Lake Superior hit a wall of rapids on the St. Marys River. Crews hauled them around on land, a job likened to moving a house that could take weeks. Sault…
161. Canada built its own canal at the Soo after the US refused one steamerIn 1870 the United States refused to let the Canadian steamer Chicora, carrying Colonel Garnet Wolseley, through its locks at Sault Ste. Marie. Canadians drew the obvious lesson: …
162. Savoy gave Italy its royal family and then became part of FranceItaly's kings came from the House of Savoy, an Alpine dynasty named after a region that now sits in France. The swap happened in 1860: to win French help in unifying Italy, Savoy'…
163. Heaps of broken rock can hide permafrost in surprisingly mild climatesThe loose rubble piled beneath cliffs looks like nothing more than debris. Yet cold air sinking through the gaps can keep the inside of a scree slope several degrees colder than i…
164. The Salish Sea got its name in 1988, and most locals still cannot name itBetween Vancouver and Seattle lies a sea about the size of the Gulf of Riga, home shores for 8.76 million people. It only got a collective name in 1988, from a Bellingham geograph…
165. For seven years, a European empire was ruled from its own colony in RioFleeing Napoleon's armies in 1808, Portugal's royal court sailed to Brazil and liked it there. Rather than go home, the prince regent promoted the colony to a kingdom in 1815, and…
166. Tulum was a walled Maya port trading obsidian hauled from 700 kilometres awayPerched on 12-metre cliffs above the Caribbean, Tulum was among the last cities the Maya built, peaking between the 13th and 15th centuries. A shrine on its shore seems to have gu…
167. Ottoman rulers once used the word Turk mainly for Anatolian peasantsIn the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, the elite called themselves Ottomans, and Türk was a label for Anatolian villagers. Only as European nationalism spread did the name gain…
168. In one creation story, a muskrat's muddy nose built North AmericaSeveral Northeastern Woodlands peoples tell of a world resting on a turtle's back. After a great flood, animals dove for mud; the beaver and loon failed, but the muskrat surfaced …
169. Hawaii's favourite instrument arrived aboard a ship full of Madeiran cabinet makersThe ukulele is a Hawaiian name for a Portuguese idea. Madeiran immigrants who stepped off the SS Ravenscrag in 1879 were soon giving nightly street concerts, and three cabinet mak…
170. Italy's only region without coast or foreign border once hid a microstateUmbria touches neither sea nor another country, the only Italian region that can say so. Tucked inside it is the hamlet of Cospaia, which ran itself as a tiny republic from 1440 t…
171. Some historians argue that calling the Civil War North the Union concedes too muchFor generations, Americans have spoken of the Union versus the Confederacy. In 2015 historian Michael Landis argued the phrasing quietly accepts the secessionist view that the cou…
172. India runs eight of its regions straight from New Delhi rather than through statesMost of India governs itself through elected state governments, but eight union territories answer directly to the centre, usually through a lieutenant governor or administrator t…
173. Egypt and Syria merged into one country in 1958, and it lasted three yearsIn January 1958 a delegation of Syrian officers flew to Cairo uninvited and asked Egypt to absorb their country. Within weeks the United Arab Republic existed, with Gamal Abdel Na…
174. Tudor England nearly doubled its population and flipped its religion five timesBetween 1485 and 1603, England went from roughly 2.3 million people to about 4 million, built its first permanent navy and changed official religion with almost every monarch. Hen…
175. The University of California began as a merger that wasn't really oneIn the 1860s California had two half-colleges: a private liberal arts school with buildings and students but no money, and a state college with federal money but existing only on …
176. USC got the name Trojans during a disastrous detour into rugbyBetween 1911 and 1913, USC dropped American football for rugby and was thrashed by more experienced teams while the school's finances wobbled. A Los Angeles Times writer, admiring…
177. Valdez, Alaska: a town born of a gold-rush con and moved after an earthquakeIn 1898 steamship companies sold Klondike prospectors on a supposedly easier route to the gold fields via Valdez. The glacier trail turned out twice as long and steep as advertise…
178. Valentinian I ruled all of Rome for barely a month, then split itWhen Roman officials met at Nicaea in 364 to replace a mysteriously dead emperor, one candidate kept refusing, another seemed too boorish and a third lived too far away. They sett…
179. U.S. News stopped printing its magazine but kept printing its rankingsFor decades U.S. News & World Report trailed Time and Newsweek as America's third news weekly. Then its college rankings, launched in 1983, grew more influential than its journali…
180. The UN refugee agency was meant to close after three yearsWhen the United Nations set up its refugee office, many member states balked at creating anything permanent, so it was given a three-year lifespan starting in 1951 and a budget of…

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