Intellect Plus
Nature
2,227 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 4 of 38.
- The Army engineers who once ran West Point and now run America's damsAmerica's military engineers began with a chief engineer and two assistants fortifying Bunker Hill in 1775, many of the early recruits being borrowed French officers. Today the Ar…
- Why America's Interior Department has nothing to do with policeIn most countries an interior ministry means police and internal security. America's version manages national parks, dams, wildlife refuges and relations with Native nations, whic…
- Most American hundred-dollar bills may be living outside AmericaThe $100 bill makes up the overwhelming bulk of US cash by value, and Federal Reserve figures from 2017 showed more hundreds in existence than singles. Yet a Chicago Fed study est…
- Why Taiwan still writes Kaohsiung while mainland China switched to PinyinFor most of the 20th century, English readers met Chinese names through Wade–Giles, the system behind spellings like Kaohsiung and Chiang Ching-kuo. Mainland China adopted Pinyin …
- Wallace Stegner, the Dean of Western Writers, and his famous Stanford studentsWallace Stegner said he had lived in twenty places in eight states and Canada, then spent his career explaining the American West. He won a Pulitzer for Angle of Repose, founded S…
- How the Welland Canal lets ships climb around Niagara FallsLake Erie sits 99.5 metres above Lake Ontario, and the only natural link between them plunges over Niagara Falls. Since November 30, 1829, the Welland Canal has carried ships up a…
- Westchester County grew from 24,000 people to a million as a pioneer suburbWhen the first federal census counted Westchester County in 1790, about 24,000 people lived there. Railroads, an aqueduct and North America's first modern multi-lane parkway turne…
- Why Van Diemen's Land changed its name to Tasmania in 1856By the 1850s the name Van Diemen's Land made English readers shudder. About 73,000 convicts had been shipped there, some 40% of all those sent to Australia, and penal stations lik…
- Vancouver Island was first named for two rival captains who got alongWhen a Spanish commander and a British captain met at Nootka Sound in 1792, they failed to settle who owned the coast but liked each other enough to share a name: Quadra and Vanco…
- Vervet monkeys shout different warnings for leopards, eagles and snakesA vervet monkey that spots a leopard gives one call; an eagle or a python triggers another, each sound distinct. Infants pick up these alarms just by watching, and the monkeys eve…
- Victoria Island is slightly bigger than Great Britain but home to 2,168 peopleStraddling Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, Canada's second-largest island covers about 219,191 square kilometres, a touch more than Great Britain. Yet the 2021 census found…
- The Hungarian Vizsla nearly vanished twice before winning Crufts in 2010After the Second World War, a search across Hungary turned up only about a dozen purebred Vizslas. From that tiny remnant the copper-coated pointer bounced back, reaching American…
- Volcanic ash is really shattered magma, glass and crystal smaller than 2 mmVolcanic ash is not soot. Each grain, smaller than 2 mm, is a shard of rock, crystal or glass, formed when gas bubbles rip rising magma apart or when magma meets water and flashes…
- From lava fountains to exploding gas slugs, how volcanoes choose their styleVolcanologists name eruption styles after the mountains that made them famous. Hawaii's volcanoes ooze runny basalt in fountains and curtains of fire, Stromboli pops like a burst …
- Wildlife once meant game for hunters; now it includes the rats downtownThe word wildlife used to be close to a synonym for game, the birds and mammals people shot for sport. Today it covers anything living wild that people did not introduce, from dee…
- A shipwreck off Wollongong keeps coughing up bottles of 1881 cognacIn 1881 the British clipper Queen of Nations ran aground near Wollongong carrying 24,000 bottles of Hennessy cognac. Police and customs officers saved at least 5,500; locals helpe…
- Religion split the Slavs by alphabet: Latin letters west, Cyrillic eastPoles, Czechs, Slovaks, Sorbs and Kashubians share West Slavic languages and, since the ninth century, mostly Roman Catholicism. That conversion brought the Latin alphabet and tie…
- Petroleum did not save the whales; whaling actually peaked in the 1960sA popular story says kerosene rescued whales by making their oil obsolete. In fact, commercial whaling hit its peak in the 1960s, long after petroleum arrived. Whale oil had lit L…
- The White House press briefing grew out of a reporter loitering at the gatesIn the 1890s, a young reporter named William Price, hoping to land a newspaper job, simply stationed himself outside the White House and questioned visitors as they came and went.…
- The white rhino is grey, and nobody really knows where its name came fromWhite rhinos range from yellowish brown to slate grey, so the name clearly has nothing to do with colour. A popular tale blames English settlers mishearing the Dutch word for wide…
- White storks fly around the Mediterranean because warm air will not lift them over waterA white stork flying from Europe to Africa for winter will not take the short route across the Mediterranean. It relies on rising thermals to soar with little effort, and those co…
- From 21 wild birds to over 800: the whooping crane's narrow escapeBy 1941 hunting and habitat loss had left just 21 wild whooping cranes, plus two in captivity. North America's tallest bird was a whisker from vanishing. Decades of protection and…
- Antarctica's land is nearly lifeless, but its seafloor teems with giantsAntarctica has no native land mammals, reptiles or amphibians at all, and its frozen interior is among the emptiest places on Earth. Yet a single square metre of its seabed can ho…
- A covered bowl of parrot eggs could tell a Yoruba king to abdicateYoruba monarchs ruled only while their people approved. If a king turned tyrannical or incompetent, the order to leave the throne might arrive as a symbolic message: parrot eggs i…
- The Younger Dryas plunged Greenland back into deep cold in three years or lessAbout 12,900 years ago, as the last ice age was ending, the North Atlantic world lurched back into the cold. Greenland's annual temperatures fell by up to 10 degrees Celsius, a dr…
- Did Yucatán get its name from a Maya phrase for I don't understand you?When Spanish explorers reached the Yucatán Peninsula in 1517 and asked what the land was called, the replies may have been a puzzled I don't understand you. That is one of three c…
- Zermatt bans combustion-engine cars to protect its view of the MatterhornIn Zermatt, cars with combustion engines are banned so that exhaust haze never dims the view of the Matterhorn. Visitors arrive by train, then ride almost silent electric taxis, b…
- Zhejiang University fled across China in wartime while guarding a vast imperial libraryWhen Japanese armies advanced in 1937, Zhejiang University packed up and retreated from Hangzhou, moving again and again until it settled in Guizhou in China's southwest. Along th…
- Tiny zooplankton graze most of the ocean's daily plant growthThe biggest grazers in the sea are not whales or fish. Microscopic zooplankton, mostly single-celled hunters, eat an estimated 59 to 75 percent of the ocean's fresh plant producti…
- Wonsan endured the longest siege in modern American naval historyFrom March 1951 until 27 July 1953, United States warships besieged and shelled the North Korean port of Wonsan without letup, the longest such siege in modern American naval hist…
- WWF's panda logo was modelled on Chi Chi, a lone panda in LondonIn 1961 the new World Wildlife Fund needed a symbol that crossed language barriers and printed well in black and white. The answer was Chi Chi, a giant panda moved from Beijing Zo…
- Among China's Yi, weather is said to change within a few milesNearly all of China's nine million Yi live in mountains, often farming steep slopes far from any city. Altitude varies so sharply across their lands that an old saying holds that …
- The agency that inherited America's leftover land now oversees an eighth of itIts holdings were once dismissed as land nobody wanted, the ground homesteaders passed over. Today the Bureau of Land Management looks after more than 247.3 million acres, about o…
- Carrying capacity began as a shipping term before ecologists made it their KEvery environment has a ceiling: the largest population of a species it can sustain with the food, water and space available. Ecologists write that ceiling as K, from the German f…
- Can we ever know what it is like to be another animal?Until 1989, vets trained in the United States were taught simply to ignore animal pain, and researchers into the 1980s were unsure whether animals felt it at all. Behind that gap …
- Anthropologists now work far beyond the university, from crime labs to cyberspaceThe classic image is a scholar living in a remote village taking notes. By 2014, though, most American anthropologists and archaeologists worked in research jobs, consulting or go…
- Top predators reshape whole landscapes, and scientists still argue whether humans countWhen gray wolves returned to Yellowstone in 1995, elk grew scarcer and warier, and streamside willows, aspens and cottonwoods sprang back. That is the reach of an apex predator. W…
- Arginine, named for silvery crystals, keeps cats alive and helps make nitric oxideIn 1886 a German chemist pulled a new amino acid from yellow lupin seedlings and named it after the Greek for silver, because its nitrate crystals gleamed white. Arginine turns ou…
- Living light has evolved dozens of times, and once guided a lost pilot homeLow on options after his instruments failed, future Apollo 13 astronaut Jim Lovell switched off his cockpit lights and spotted the glowing wake of his aircraft carrier, then follo…
- Bottlenose dolphins carry sponges as tools and sense electric fields with baby whisker pitsSome bottlenose dolphins forage with marine sponges held on their snouts, a skill passed down through generations. Their brain-to-body measure beats chimpanzees', calves are born …
- Germany's highest mountain straddles a border and once argued about its own heightThe Zugspitze, named for the paths avalanches carve down it, tops out at 2,962 metres, a figure the summit cafe's lounge now carries as its name. Estimates once varied by nearly 3…
- Zulu, South Africa's most common home language, only got written down in the 1800sAbout 13.56 million people speak Zulu as a first language, and over half of South Africans understand it. Yet its first grammar was printed in Norway, its click sounds are unknown…
- Inbreeding changes no gene frequencies, yet it can doom a populationA common assumption holds that inbreeding makes harmful genes more common. It does not, at least not directly. What it changes is how often those genes pair up. Wolves on an isola…
- Ithaca gave the world the sundae and an early dancing-skeleton filmIn 1892 an Ithaca fountain owner topped vanilla ice cream with cherry syrup for a local minister, who suggested naming it after the day of the week. The spelling was later altered…
- The giant African land snail will eat cardboard, stucco and its siblings' shellsIt grows to 20 centimetres long, lays around 200 eggs at a time several times a year, and will eat crops, trash, cardboard and occasionally the stucco off walls. Starting from Eas…
- Monarch butterflies reach Mexican mountains their great-grandparents leftEvery autumn, monarchs from southern Canada and the northern United States fly thousands of kilometres to fir-clad volcanic peaks in central Mexico. None of them has made the trip…
- Why omnivore is a slippery label, from alligators eating fruit to seed-eating squirrelsAlligators have been caught eating fruit, perhaps on purpose. Squirrels, supposedly seed eaters, raid birds' nests for eggs and chicks. Geese eat animals young and plants later. B…
- The Lightning stacked two jet engines on top of each otherThis British Mach 2 fighter carried its two Rolls-Royce Avon engines one above the other inside the fuselage, a distinctly unusual layout. Pilots compared flying it to being saddl…
- Eutherians, the true beasts, lost a pair of bones to make room for pregnancyMarsupials and monotremes, every living mammal outside the placentals, carry a pair of small epipubic bones. You do not. Losing them let the belly expand during pregnancy, one of …
- Blood feeding evolved again and again, from finches to mothsBlood is rich in protein and fat and easy to take, so evolution keeps inventing ways to drink it. Leeches, lampreys, vampire bats and roughly 14,000 kinds of arthropods do it. So …
- Humus, the dark soil layer whose backbone can outlast centuriesUnder the leaf litter lies a dark, spongy layer that soil scientists still cannot fully define. Humus is decomposed plant and animal matter, yet it is far from dead, teeming with …
- The hyacinth macaw's survival depends on a toucan that also eats its eggsIn Brazil's Pantanal, 90 per cent of hyacinth macaw nests sit in manduvi trees, and toco toucans spread 83 per cent of that tree's seeds. The same toucans account for 53 per cent …
- Why overheating differs from a fever, even when the thermometer reads the sameA fever and dangerous overheating can show identical temperatures, yet the body is doing opposite things. In fever, the brain deliberately raises its thermostat. In hyperthermia, …
- Iceland reportedly hesitated over Christianity because converts had to give up horse meatIn the eighth century, popes told the missionary Saint Boniface to forbid horse meat among converted Germans, since it was bound up with pagan rites. Icelanders allegedly resisted…
- Horseshoe crabs are not crabs, and their blood helps detect bacterial contaminationDespite the name, horseshoe crabs are closer kin to spiders, ticks and scorpions than to any crab or lobster. They have barely changed in some 250 million years, and people now ha…
- Hoverflies dress like wasps but spend their days pollinating flowers and eating aphidsThat striped insect hanging motionless over your garden is probably no wasp at all. Many of the roughly 6,000 hoverfly species copy the colours of stinging bees and wasps, a bluff…
- The Aztec sun god whose name contains a hummingbird, and whose dead became hummingbirdsHuitzilopochtli, patron of the Aztecs and their capital Tenochtitlan, carries a hummingbird in his name. Believers held that warriors killed in battle and women who died giving bi…
- A Wembley derby emptied Hull so completely that a sign asked for lights offHull splits its rugby league loyalties along the River Hull: Hull FC to the west, Hull Kingston Rovers to the east. When the two met in the 1980 Challenge Cup final at Wembley, so…
- The Humboldt penguin reacts to people 150 metres away, the shyest penguin studiedWalk within 150 metres of a nesting Humboldt penguin and it notices, the greatest reaction distance recorded for any penguin. Its heart can take up to half an hour to settle after…
- A moth that hovers and hums like a hummingbird, yet evolved entirely separatelySpot what looks like a tiny hummingbird sipping from honeysuckle in Europe and you have probably seen a moth. The hummingbird hawk-moth hovers audibly in front of tubular flowers,…