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Nature

2,233 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 6 of 38.

301. 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…
302. 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…
303. 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…
304. 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 …
305. 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…
306. 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 …
307. Geologists began by arguing Earth was far older than anyone thoughtIn 1785 James Hutton told the Royal Society of Edinburgh that mountains wear down, their sediments harden into rock on the seabed, and that rock is lifted into new land. Such cycl…
308. Foot-and-mouth virus spreads before symptoms show, which makes it a farmer's nightmareFoot-and-mouth disease rarely kills adult livestock, yet countries will cull healthy herds and ban meat exports to stop it. The reason is its sheer ease of travel: on boots, lorri…
309. Formic acid was first collected by distilling large numbers of antsIn 1671 the English naturalist John Ray described how he obtained a sharp-smelling acid by distilling a great many ants. The substance took its name from formica, Latin for ant. I…
310. The second Bond film invented much of what we now call a Bond moviePresident Kennedy listed Ian Fleming's From Russia, with Love among his ten favourite books, so the producers picked it for Bond's second outing. The 1963 film, made for $2 millio…
311. A full moon is only truly full for an instant, and rarely completelyWe talk about a full moon as if it lasted all night, yet the phase peaks at a single moment, often while the Moon sits below the horizon. And because its orbit is tilted about fiv…
312. Galactose, the milk sugar half, also helps decide your blood typeSplit lactose and you get two simple sugars: glucose and galactose. The second one differs from glucose by the flip of a single group of atoms, yet our bodies cannot burn it direc…
313. Gannets hit the sea at 100 km/h, cushioned by built-in bubble wrapA hunting gannet folds its wings and plunges from as high as 30 metres, striking the water at around 100 kilometres an hour. It survives that impact thanks to air sacs under the s…
314. A Trojan shepherd carried off by an eagle ended up as Aquarius in the skyHomer called Ganymede the loveliest mortal ever born, so lovely that the gods took him from Troy to pour wine for Zeus. Later tellers made Zeus's eagle, or Zeus himself in feather…
315. In the eastern Himalayan hills, wealth has long been counted in gayalAcross the forested hills of Northeast India, a family's standing was traditionally measured by how many gayal it owned. These half-wild cattle, also called mithun, have served as…
316. Flying squirrels cannot fly, but they steer with a wingtip found nowhere elseNo flying squirrel has ever flapped its way into the air. What the 50 species do instead is glide, sometimes as far as 90 metres, on a furry membrane stretched from wrist to ankle…
317. Why food chains rarely stretch beyond five linksEach step up a food chain loses most of its energy. Generally only about a tenth of what one feeding level holds reaches the next; the rest is burned in the business of staying al…
318. Your arms and legs began as the fins of ancient fishThe limbs of every four-legged animal, including humans, match the paired pectoral and pelvic fins of jawed fish. They descend from freshwater lobe-finned fish whose fleshy, bone-…
319. Fishcakes turned leftover fish and cold potatoes into a global favouriteMrs Beeton's 19th-century household guide asked for leftover fish and cold potatoes. Across the world, the same simple idea of minced seafood bound with starch became Japanese kam…
320. Fishing bait works, though nobody fully knows why fish biteWorms, cheese, boilies, spoons and even robotic fish all end up on hooks. Yet how fish respond to particular baits remains poorly understood. Florida sunfish will grab a ball of b…
321. Brixham's sleek sailing boats launched the age of deep-sea trawlingOverfishing off South Devon pushed Brixham's fishermen farther out in the early 19th century, so they built fast, tall-rigged boats strong enough to drag big nets in deep water. T…
322. Flesh flies skip the egg stage and deliver live maggotsMost flies lay eggs, but flesh flies are ovoviviparous: the female deposits larvae that have already hatched or are hatching. Their family name, Sarcophagidae, joins Greek words f…
323. Flickr grew out of tools built for a shelved online gameVancouver's Ludicorp was building a browser game called Game Neverending when its photo-sharing tools looked more promising than the game itself. Flickr launched on February 10, 2…
324. Fly fishing lets the line's weight carry a lure that weighs almost nothingAn artificial fly is too light and fluffy to throw against air resistance, so fly anglers turn the method around: a heavy line does the casting and the feathered hook simply rides…
325. Chicago's Field Museum grew out of the 1893 World's FairWhen the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition closed, Edward Ayer persuaded department-store magnate Marshall Field to fund a museum for its exhibits. The result now holds over 24 mi…
326. A burnt thumb made Fionn mac Cumhaill the wisest hero in IrelandThe poet Finnegas spent seven years hunting one salmon in the Boyne, prophesied to grant whoever ate it complete knowledge. He caught it and told his young pupil to cook it. The b…
327. Water, dense and dim, shaped every part of a fish's bodyWater is far denser than air, carries little dissolved oxygen and swallows light quickly. Those three facts explain much of how a fish is built, from its two-chambered heart and s…
328. The Norse gods bound Fenrir with a ribbon, and Týr paid with his handIn Norse myth the gods raised a wolf pup they had been warned would one day kill Odin. As he grew alarmingly fast, they tried to chain him with iron twice and failed. The third fe…
329. Mustangs and brumbies are not wild horses; they are escaped domestic onesA feral animal descends from domesticated stock but lives on its own. That excludes a lion that escapes from a zoo, and it includes the mustangs of the American West, Australia's …
330. The word fetish was born in trade talk between Portuguese sailors and West AfricansLong before it meant an obsession, a fetish was a label Portuguese traders pinned on the sacred objects they saw along the West African coast in the 1500s. European thinkers later…
331. Male fiddler crabs regrow weaker claws and bluff their rivals anywayA male fiddler crab carries one claw far bigger than the other, and he uses it to fight, to shed heat and to beckon females in waves timed with his neighbours. If he loses it, the…
332. Every living Przewalski's horse descends from just 12 wild-caught ancestorsSome species survive only behind fences, in greenhouses or in hobbyists' tanks. Conservationists label them extinct in the wild, and the only way off that list is to put animals o…
333. Harris's hawks hunt in packs like wolves, which makes them falconry favouritesMost birds of prey hunt alone, but Harris's hawks live in groups with a pecking order and chase quarry together, behaviour no other raptor shows. That sociability makes them easy …
334. The false killer whale was known only from a fossil skull until carcasses washed upRichard Owen described this animal in 1846 from a skull dug out of the Lincolnshire Fens and took it for a kind of porpoise. Scientists assumed it was extinct until bodies came as…
335. Fantasia began as a pricey Mickey Mouse short that Disney couldn't afford to release aloneWalt Disney wanted to revive Mickey Mouse, whose popularity was slipping behind Donald Duck and Goofy, with a lavish cartoon set to Paul Dukas's The Sorcerer's Apprentice. When it…
336. The fennec fox's giant ears work as both radiators and underground microphonesThe smallest member of the dog family weighs as little as a kilogram, yet no other canid has ears so large relative to its body. Those ears shed Saharan heat and pick up prey movi…
337. Magnetite, the mineral that taught people magnetism, also sits in brainsA chunk of naturally magnetised magnetite, called lodestone, will tug small bits of iron toward it, and that is how ancient people first stumbled on magnetism. The same black iron…
338. On India's Malabar Coast, farmers grow rice below sea levelIn Kuttanad, the lowest point in India, farmers plant rice on land that lies beneath the level of the sea, one of the few places on Earth where that happens. The area, nicknamed t…
339. A plucky mouse deer supposedly inspired the founding of MalaccaLegend says Parameswara, a prince fleeing an attack on Singapura, was resting under a tree while out hunting when his hounds trapped a tiny mouse deer. The little animal kicked th…
340. The F-35 grew out of a hunt for a supersonic Harrier replacementThe F-35 began as several cash-strapped programmes stitched together. One was a secret effort to build a stealthy jump jet able to fly faster than sound; others aimed to replace a…
341. Lovebirds earned their name by pairing for life and sitting closeLovebirds get their name from the way mated pairs bond for life and spend long stretches perched side by side. Weighing just 40 to 60 grams, these African parrots are among the sm…
342. The English word cay comes from the vanished Lucayans of the BahamasEvery time someone mentions a Florida key or a Caribbean cay, they are using a Lucayan word. The islanders called themselves Lukku-Cairi, people of the islands, and cairi passed i…
343. Luton's football club is still called the Hatters for a vanished tradeLuton Town fans still go by the Hatters, a nod to the straw hats that made the Bedfordshire town famous. The trade took root in the 17th century, after a band of Scots sheltered b…
344. Maasai Mara means spotted, after the bushes dotting its grasslandSeen from a distance, the Kenyan plains near the Tanzanian border look speckled with short, bushy trees, so the Maasai called the place Mara, meaning spotted in their Maa language…
345. India's Central Province holds its biggest diamond and copper reservesMadhya Pradesh literally means central province, and it sits squarely in the heart of India, bordered by five other states. It is the country's second largest by area, home to ove…
346. Matthew Arnold wrote Dover Beach while inspecting schools from railway waiting roomsTo afford marriage, the poet Matthew Arnold took a job as a school inspector in 1851 and kept it for 35 years. He called the work drudgery, but constant rail travel meant he saw m…
347. The man who named Australia was found under a London station in 2019Matthew Flinders first sailed around mainland Australia and popularised its name, calling it kinder to the ear than Terra Australis. Then the French held him captive for over six …
348. Antarctica's biggest town once ran on its own small nuclear reactorFrom 1962 to 1972, McMurdo Station on Ross Island drew electricity from a portable nuclear plant that also turned seawater into roughly 14,000 gallons of fresh water a day. Today …
349. In Mecklenburg you needed the grand duke's permission to marry until 1918Long after other German states dropped such rules, people in Mecklenburg still had to ask their grand duke before marrying or emigrating, and in the late nineteenth century he per…
350. Why California, Chile, Cape Town and Perth share the Mediterranean's weatherWine country in California, Chile, South Africa and Australia shares a pattern with the shores of the Mediterranean: rainy, mild winters and long, parched summers. The cause is a …
351. The world's rarest seal learned to hide its pups in sea cavesMediterranean monk seals once lounged and gave birth on open beaches from the Black Sea to the Azores. Hunted, netted and crowded out, the survivors retreated into remote caves wi…
352. Menorca changed hands between Britain, France and Spain four times in a centuryThe smaller of the two big Balearic islands, Menorca simply means lesser island in Latin. Its sheltered harbour at Mahon made it a prize: British, French and Spanish flags swapped…
353. Maltese is an Arabic-born language written only in the Latin alphabetMaltese grew from the Arabic spoken in medieval Sicily, yet it has never been written in Arabic script. It is the European Union's only official Semitic language, and a Maltese sp…
354. Money laundering moves dirty cash through three stages: placement, layering and integrationAl Capone went down for tax evasion, so gangsters started paying their taxes, and law enforcement needed new tools. Those tools became anti-money-laundering rules, aimed at the pr…
355. Pine nuts are naked seeds, not nuts, and a pinyon cone needs two summersBotanically a pine nut is not a nut at all. Pines are gymnosperms, from the Greek for naked seed, so their seeds sit bare instead of inside a fruit. Of all the pine species, only …
356. The pink fairy armadillo, the smallest of its kind, swims through sandAt 90 to 115 millimetres long and about 120 grams, the pink fairy armadillo is the smallest armadillo alive. It lives only in the dry scrub and dunes of central Argentina and can …
357. A Smoky Mountains town grew around a school founded with $15,000 of church moneyIn 1910 a survey ranked Sevier County as the part of Tennessee most in need of schools. A Methodist minister answered with a nearly free school in the Smokies, and the town that g…
358. Greenwich became longitude zero partly because most of the world's sea charts already used itIn 1884, delegates from twenty-six countries met in Washington, D.C., to settle on a single starting line for longitude. Greenwich won, largely because the United States already b…
359. Messina, named for its sickle-shaped harbour, keeps rebuilding after repeated catastrophesThe Sicels who founded the city in 757 BC called it Zancle, their word for sickle, after the curve of its natural harbour. Since then Messina, on the strait between Sicily and the…
360. Around six million years ago the Mediterranean Sea very nearly dried upRoughly 5.96 million years ago the forerunner of the Strait of Gibraltar closed, cutting the Mediterranean off from the Atlantic. Evaporation did the rest, shrinking the sea into …

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