Intellect Plus
Nature
2,227 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 5 of 38.
- Some huntsman spiders cartwheel down dunes, and one tick like a quartz clockIn Namibia's Namib desert, the wheel spider escapes by curling up and cartwheeling across the sand, while a relative, Cebrennus rechenbergi, flees using handsprings. Both belong t…
- Muslim-majority Indonesia still has one of the world's largest Hindu populationsHinduism shaped the Indonesian islands for over a thousand years before Islam spread along trade routes. Today it survives most strongly on Bali, where nearly 87 percent of people…
- Homeopathic remedies are often diluted until no original molecule remainsHomeopathy rests on two ideas from 1796: that like cures like, and that diluting a substance makes it stronger. Many remedies are thinned so far that not one molecule of the start…
- The world's first airmail stamps were printed for a pigeon serviceBetween 1898 and 1908, a pigeon post linking Auckland to Great Barrier Island issued what are considered the world's first airmail stamps. Homing pigeons had carried messages for …
- Before Europeans arrived, the Americas had no honey bees at allHoney bees now buzz on every continent except Antarctica, but the Americas had none in human times until European colonists brought them in the 16th century. Of roughly 20,000 kno…
- Honeypot ants turn some of their workers into living food jarsIn honeypot ant colonies, certain workers are fed until their abdomens balloon to the size of grapes. Too swollen to move, they hang from the ceilings of underground chambers as a…
- A camel's hoof is not really a hoof at allA hoof is a toe tip armoured in thick keratin, worn by horses, cattle, deer and even some dinosaurs. Camels only look the part: their feet end in soft toes with nails. Real hooves…
- Hookworm larvae travel through the lungs before settling in the gutA hookworm larva that bores into a bare foot takes a strange detour. It rides the bloodstream to the lungs, climbs the windpipe, gets coughed up and swallowed, and only then reach…
- Hookworms infected about 428 million people in 2015, mostly through bare feetHookworm infection rarely kills, yet in 2015 it affected around 428 million people. Larvae living in contaminated soil slip through the skin of anyone walking barefoot where sanit…
- Glass sponges may be the longest-lived animals on EarthDeep in the ocean, sponges built from glassy silica may live for millennia. Some marine biologists tentatively put their maximum age at up to 15,000 years. These strange animals h…
- A group of Highland cattle is called a fold, not a herdShaggy, long-horned Highland cattle gather in folds, named after the open stone shelters where they once spent winter nights out of the weather. The breed was bred to survive the …
- Two former restaurant waiters led a small Canadian show to global fameJacob Tierney contacted novelist Rachel Reid the day after a newspaper article about hockey romance. Financiers wanted to soften the story, so he held out for backers who would le…
- A hockey fan's anger at her sport's culture became a bestselling romanceRachel Reid loved hockey but felt ashamed of how homophobic its culture was. So she began writing novels about closeted players and what coming out might cost them. The second, He…
- Heme puts iron at the centre of a ring and life runs on itBlood is red because of heme, a flat ring of four pyrrole units holding a single iron atom. That tiny structure ferries oxygen, detoxifies drugs, senses gases and shuttles electro…
- Hermit crabs live in secondhand homes, and a shortage turns deadlyA hermit crab's soft, curled abdomen has no armour of its own, so it borrows a snail's empty shell and carries it everywhere. As the crab grows it must find a bigger one. That con…
- The world's biggest falcon spends Arctic winters out on the sea iceThe gyrfalcon is the largest falcon alive, with some females outweighing the males by nearly double. Scientists long assumed it stuck to tundra and mountains, until 2011 revealed …
- For a century, scientists wrongly pictured duck-billed dinosaurs wading in swampsDuck-billed dinosaurs were among the most successful plant-eaters of the Late Cretaceous, grinding their food with stacked batteries of teeth. Yet from the 1850s until 1964, exper…
- Haida Gwaii may have been a stepping stone for the first AmericansOff the coast of British Columbia lies an archipelago of about 400 islands where people have lived for 13,000 years. Archaeologists think its then-dry coastline may have guided th…
- Baby halibut are born symmetrical, then one eye travels across the headA young halibut looks like an ordinary fish, with an eye on each side. At about six months old, one eye migrates over the skull to join the other, and the fish settles into life l…
- Hallucigenia was drawn upside down and backwards before anyone got it rightWhen Simon Conway Morris named a tiny Cambrian fossil in 1977, he pictured it tottering on stiff spines with tentacles waving from its back. The name he chose, Hallucigenia, honou…
- The harlequin ladybird was hired to eat aphids and then conquered continentsFarmers released the harlequin ladybird to devour aphids, and it did its job. Then it kept going. Native to eastern Asia, it now thrives across North America, Europe, South Americ…
- The hawksbill turtle lives on sponges and glows under the right lightMost reptiles would never touch a sea sponge, but for the hawksbill turtle sponges make up 70 to 95 percent of the menu. It is the only reptile that specialises in them. It was al…
- Nineteenth-century naturalists split the grizzly into 86 species; genetics made it oneIn the 1800s, naturalists carved grizzly bears into 86 separate species. By 1928 the count was seven, and by 1953 just one. Modern genetics goes further: the grizzly is simply Nor…
- Guanajuato, the Mexican state named frog hill, holds seven extinct volcanic lanternsIn the southern valleys of Guanajuato, seven dead volcanoes rise abruptly from farmland, their craters up to a kilometre wide. Locals call them holes; a legend of all seven once b…
- Bird droppings once funded Peru, sparked a war and built an American empireIn the nineteenth century, seabird droppings became one of the world's most fought-over commodities. Guano royalties turned into Peru's biggest source of revenue, the United State…
- North America's biggest heron hunts fish, frogs, voles and even rabbitsThe great blue heron stands taller than a metre, yet usually weighs little more than two kilograms. Fish are its staple, but this patient wader of North American wetlands will spe…
- The great bustard is a flying heavyweight whose males dwarf the femalesA male great bustard collected in Manchuria weighed about 21 kg, a verified record for any flying bird. Its mate might weigh a fraction of that: in Spain, males averaged nearly tw…
- A great hornbill mother walls herself inside a tree for monthsWhen a female great hornbill nests, she seals herself into a hollow tree trunk with a plaster made largely of droppings. For weeks her mate feeds her through a narrow slit while s…
- The great white pelican's name means a bird that brays like a donkeyLinnaeus named the great white pelican onocrotalus, from a Greek word for something that brays like a donkey, after its harsh calls at breeding time. The bird itself is far from c…
- A greater kudu bull needs six years to finish twisting its hornsA greater kudu bull's horns start sprouting in his first year, complete one spiral by about age two, and reach their full two and a half turns only around six. Straightened out, t…
- Grebes look like ducks and loons but their nearest kin are flamingosGrebes swim low, dive for food and resemble loons, so for a long time scientists grouped the two together. That turned out to be convergent evolution. Molecular studies, backed by…
- The Grinch was not green until a 1966 cartoon made him soIn Dr. Seuss's 1957 book, the Grinch was drawn without his famous colour. Green arrived only with Chuck Jones's 1966 television special, when Jones and Seuss agreed it was the one…
- Godzilla almost began life as a giant octopus rather than a dinosaurToho's 1954 Godzilla rose from the wreck of a cancelled co-production, and its effects chief first pitched an enormous octopus. The finished film, a sombre story of a monster born…
- Godzilla's name blends the Japanese words for gorilla and whaleGojira fuses gorira, gorilla, with kujira, whale, hinting at a creature of vast size and ocean origins. Since 1954 that monster has starred in 38 films, 33 of them from Toho, and …
- Hollywood's 2019 Godzilla sequel honoured the man inside the original rubber suitGodzilla: King of the Monsters pitted Legendary's giant lizard against the three-headed King Ghidorah, Mothra and Rodan. It was dedicated to Haruo Nakajima, who wore the monster c…
- Two-thirds of today's continental land once belonged to a single southern landmassSouth America, Africa, Antarctica, Australia, Arabia and India were all pieces of Gondwana, a giant landmass that at its peak covered about a fifth of the planet. Its name comes f…
- Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast is classed as fantasy without containing any magicGormenghast has no wizards, dragons or spells in its first two books, yet it is ranked among the twentieth century's great fantasies. Mervyn Peake's crumbling castle, ruled by end…
- Canada's prime minister holds an office no constitutional document ever createdCanada's government formally belongs to the King, who holds every power of state yet takes no political role. The prime minister, who actually steers the country, exists only thro…
- Gozo's temples, said by legend to be built by giants, predate most standing structuresOn Gozo, Malta's quieter second island, stand the Ġgantija temples, whose Maltese name means belonging to the giants. They rank among the oldest free-standing structures anywhere,…
- The gray fox climbs bare tree trunks and sometimes dens high in treesWith hooked claws, the gray fox can scramble up a branchless trunk to 18 metres, leap between limbs and come down backwards like a house cat. It belongs to an ancient lineage that…
- Rodents and monkeys rafting from Africa reshaped South America's mammalsLong before Panama joined the Americas, a few rodents and monkeys drifted from Africa to South America on mats of flotsam. Their descendants now number 372 species, more than twic…
- The giraffe's only living relative is a shy forest animal, the okapiGiraffes stalk open savanna while okapis hide in the Congo rainforest, and at first glance they look nothing alike. Yet both have long dark tongues, lobed canine teeth and skin-co…
- Male and female genitals grow from the same embryonic budEvery human embryo, male or female, starts with the same small outgrowth called the genital tubercle. Male hormones steer it into a penis, and its tip becomes the glans, which is …
- Bristol broke away from Gloucestershire in 1373 as England's third cityGloucestershire once contained Bristol, then a modest town. By 1373 the port had grown into England's third-largest city and became a county of its own. The rural shire it left be…
- Car-sized armoured glyptodonts turned out to be true armadillosGlyptodonts were armadillos the size of a small car, up to 4 metres long and over two tonnes, sealed inside a rigid shell of hundreds of bony plates. Some swung spiked tail clubs …
- The word ghee shares an ancient root with the English word ChristGhee comes from the Sanskrit ghṛta, clarified butter, traditionally linked to a root meaning to sprinkle. That makes it a linguistic cousin of the Greek khristós, anointed, source…
- A Philippine fruit bat has the longest forearms of any bat aliveThe giant golden-crowned flying fox of the Philippines can weigh 1.4 kilograms and spread its wings up to 1.7 metres, and its forearm, at up to 215 millimetres, is the longest rec…
- The longest bony fish in the sea may explain old sea serpent sightingsThe giant oarfish is a silver ribbon with a crimson fin running its whole length, and it can reach 7 or 8 metres, perhaps even 11. Its snakelike body and rippling swimming style h…
- The world's largest ray can be told apart by a T on its backThe giant oceanic manta ray can span 7 metres across and weigh around 3,000 kilograms. Divers distinguish it from its smaller reef cousin by the pale patches on its shoulders: on …
- An amateur in a dune buggy found a rival to TyrannosaurusIn 1993 Rubén Carolini was driving a dune buggy through the Patagonian badlands when he spotted a huge leg bone. It belonged to Giganotosaurus, a predator up to about 13 metres lo…
- Every gilt-head bream starts life male, and some later become femaleThe gilt-head bream, a Mediterranean favourite on restaurant menus, matures as a male by age two. Later, some individuals grow ovaries and lose their testes. Today far more of the…
- Water striders row across ponds by pushing against waves they makeA water strider does not swim; it stands on the surface film of a pond, held up by water-repelling hairs and long splayed legs. To move, it presses its middle legs down and back, …
- Seahorses are the only animals where males are said to get pregnantIn seahorses, pipefish and sea dragons, the female deposits her eggs into a pouch on the male's chest, and he carries them until they hatch. It is the only animal family for which…
- The gharial is named for the pot-shaped bulb on a male's noseAdult male gharials grow a hollow knob at the tip of their snouts shaped like a ghara, a clay pot, and use it to make a hiss audible 75 metres away. No other living crocodilian sh…
- Geese planned to split after high school, then record labels came callingA handful of New York teenagers recorded songs in a Fort Greene basement and fully intended to go their separate ways after graduating in 2020, with some members bound for Oberlin…
- Gelatin melts below body temperature, which is why jelly dissolves on your tongueGelatin is broken-down collagen from animal skin and bones, and it has a neat trick: its gel melts at a temperature lower than the human body. That is why a spoonful of jelly turn…
- Why most male horses become geldings, and why some races ban themHorse breeders have long reckoned that only about one male in ten should stay a stallion. The rest are usually gelded, turned into calmer, more trainable animals that riders prefe…
- The gentry sat just below the nobility, living off land rather than titlesIn Britain the gentry were landowners with a coat of arms but no seat in the peerage, families who lived on rents from country estates. The word comes from an Old French term for …
- The platypus lost its own name because a beetle got there firstGeorge Shaw named the platypus Platypus in 1799, but a group of ambrosia beetles already had that genus name from 1793. Since both are animals, the name could not be shared, and t…
- The geoduck, a burrowing clam that can outlive nearly every other animalPronounced gooey-duck, this Pacific clam has a shell roughly 15 to 20 centimetres long but siphons that can stretch a metre. It typically lives around 140 years, and one specimen …