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Nature

2,227 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 7 of 38.

361. Pliny's pine-tree cloud gave the most explosive volcanoes their nameOn 24 August in AD 79, a woman urged Pliny the Elder to look at a strange cloud rising across the Bay of Naples. Her son later compared it to a pine tree, a tall trunk spreading i…
362. Plymouth is the only capital in the world that nobody lives inPlymouth is still, on paper, the capital of Montserrat, a British territory in the Caribbean. But since 1997 it has been an ash-covered ghost town, buried by the Soufrière Hills v…
363. Poaching began as a clash over who owned the right to huntFor much of history a poacher was a hungry peasant taking game the nobility claimed for itself. Under William the Conqueror's forest laws, a commoner hunting in a royal forest cou…
364. To build India's Polavaram dam, engineers moved the Godavari River sidewaysThe riverbed at Polavaram in Andhra Pradesh is deep sand, too soft to hold a spillway. So engineers shifted the whole Godavari about 6.6 km towards its right bank and built there …
365. For ancient Greeks, the polis was not a city but the entire homelandTranslating polis as city misses its meaning. For an ancient Greek, the polis was the native land itself, with its own constitution and a claim on supreme loyalty. Greece was not …
366. One Indonesian province still has a hereditary sultan as its governorIndonesian governors are normally elected for five years and limited to two terms. Yogyakarta is different: its governor is the reigning sultan, Hamengkubuwono, and his deputy is …
367. A Philippine province's income decides how many lawmakers sit on its boardIn the Philippines, how much a province earns shapes its politics. Richer provinces get ten elected members on their provincial board, the poorest get six. Voters even approved a …
368. Deadhorse, Alaska counted 1,310 residents and not a single householdThe 2020 census found 1,310 people living at Prudhoe Bay, also called Deadhorse, on Alaska's Arctic coast. It also found zero households, one vacant housing unit and roughly ten m…
369. The 44th president's two terms, from recession stimulus to the Paris AgreementBarack Obama served as the 44th US president from January 20, 2009, to January 20, 2017, the first African American and the first Hawaiian-born holder of the office. His first two…
370. Kazakhstan's constitution carved out a special exception for its first presidentKazakhstan limits its presidents to two consecutive terms, except for one man. A clause in the constitution exempted the country's first leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who held the…
371. Filipinos still argue over who counts as their first presidentOfficially, the Philippines' first president was Emilio Aguinaldo, inaugurated in 1899. But historians, a city council, House lawmakers and a descendant of the revolutionary André…
372. Privateers were licensed raiders, and one missing document could turn them into piratesFor centuries a government could hand a private shipowner a paper called a letter of marque and send him to seize enemy cargo for profit. With the paper he was a patriot sharing p…
373. Biblical prophets often preached through strange public performances rather than wordsAccording to the Hebrew Bible, Jeremiah buried a linen belt until it rotted, smashed a clay jar before the elders and wore a wooden yoke around his neck. Ezekiel lay on his side f…
374. A thorny desert tree inspired villagers to give their lives defending itIn 1730 a Rajasthani maharaja sent men to cut khejri trees near Jodhpur for a new palace. Villagers led by Amrita Devi refused to let them, and 363 people died trying to protect t…
375. Argentina grew from 13 provinces to 23 over more than a centuryArgentina did not start with its present map. Thirteen provinces emerged from town councils during the independence wars, and much of the south and north-east was governed directl…
376. In one decade, Puerto Ricans identifying as white fell from 75.8 to 17.1 percentThe people of Puerto Rico did not change between 2010 and 2020, but the way they described themselves did. Three in four checked white on the 2010 census; ten years later fewer th…
377. Why some pumps will burst their own pipes if you close the valveClose the outlet on a centrifugal pump and it simply churns. Do the same to a positive-displacement pump and it keeps shoving fluid into the blocked line until the pipe ruptures o…
378. Punta Arenas strings ropes between buildings so pedestrians survive the windOn the Strait of Magellan, gusts can reach 130 km/h, so officials in Punta Arenas put up ropes between downtown buildings for people to hold. The Chilean city, founded as a penal …
379. Punta Cana was a nameless stretch of coast until two investors bought it in the 1960sIn the late 1960s the eastern tip of the Dominican Republic was undeveloped shoreline five hours' drive from the nearest city. A young Dominican entrepreneur and a New York labour…
380. Norway claimed Queen Maud Land five days before a German expedition arrivedOn 14 January 1939 Norway annexed a slice of Antarctica about the size of India. Five days later a German ship reached the pack ice offshore, and its aircraft began dropping swast…
381. The golden apples of Greek myth may really have been quincesHard, sour and gritty when raw, the quince hardly sounds like a legendary fruit. Yet the ancients called it a golden apple, dedicated it to Aphrodite and used it in wedding rites.…
382. Quirino province stayed beyond Spain's reach for most of the colonial eraThrough more than three centuries of Spanish rule in the Philippines, the jungle-clad hills that are now Quirino province stayed almost untouched. Spain sent a single military exp…
383. Radio Free Europe once sent 350,000 balloons of leaflets across the Iron CurtainBetween 1951 and 1956, Central European skies filled with weather balloons carrying more than 300 million leaflets, posters and books. They came from Radio Free Europe, a station …
384. Przemyśl's ring of 44 forts held off a Russian army for months in 1914Przemyśl sits in a natural gap between mountains and lowlands on the San River, which is why it has changed hands so often. Before the First World War, Austria ringed it with 44 f…
385. Public-private partnerships borrow privately, but taxpayers or users always pay the billA public-private partnership lets a company build and run a school, hospital or road up front, then collect payments for decades. It can look like free infrastructure. It is not: …
386. From willow ropes to spun wire: how suspension bridges learned to leapA suspension bridge turns every load into pull on its main cables, which is why it can leap farther than any other design. The idea is ancient, from rope bridges across chasms to …
387. The Sutlej, the river of a hundred courses that powers northern IndiaIn the Mahabharata, the sage Vasishtha leapt into a flooded Himalayan river, which mistook him for unquenchable fire and split into a hundred channels to avoid him. That legend ga…
388. The Swiss are a nation by choice, not by language or ethnicitySwitzerland has no single Swiss ethnicity or shared mother tongue. German, French, Italian and Romansh speakers make up its citizenry, bound together as a Willensnation, a nation …
389. How a salt town in upstate New York borrowed its name from SicilyIn 1820 a would-be post office town in central New York was refused the name Corinth because another village already had it. John Wilkinson, having read about Syracuse in Sicily, …
390. Syracuse University exists partly because Ezra Cornell was once cheated of his wagesSyracuse wanted Cornell University, and Andrew Dickson White pushed hard for the city. But Ezra Cornell had once been cheated of his wages as a young carpenter there, so he put hi…
391. Syriac, the Aramaic dialect that carried Christianity from Edessa to ChinaA local Aramaic dialect from the city of Edessa became, alongside Greek and Latin, one of the three great languages of early Christianity. Syriac-speaking churches carried it as f…
392. Tajik, the mountain Persian that kept words the rest of Iran lostTajik is Persian as spoken in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, close enough to Afghanistan's Dari to be mutually intelligible. Isolated in Central Asian mountains and exposed to Russian…
393. How mountains wring air dry and build deserts on their far sideMountains do not just block the wind; they strip it of water. Moist air forced up a range cools and dumps its rain on the windward slopes, then sinks, warms and dries out beyond t…
394. The crusader lord whose raids provoked Saladin into destroying Jerusalem's armyRaynald of Châtillon arrived in the Holy Land as a younger son of French nobility and married his way into ruling Antioch and later Transjordan. His raids on Muslim caravans and a…
395. The red fox, the most widely distributed carnivore species on the planetNo other member of the order Carnivora ranges as widely as the red fox. It spans the whole Northern Hemisphere, has moved into suburbs and cities, and after being introduced to Au…
396. Third World first meant politically unaligned, not poorWhen the French demographer Alfred Sauvy wrote of a third world in 1952, he was echoing the Third Estate of pre-revolutionary France: ignored and exploited commoners who wanted to…
397. Tampere grew rich on an 18-metre drop between two Finnish lakesTampere sits on a strip of land squeezed between Lake Näsijärvi and Lake Pyhäjärvi, whose surfaces differ by 18 metres. The rapids linking them, Tammerkoski, powered mills, a Scot…
398. The Tarim Basin's rivers flow inland and vanish in the desertMeltwater from the mountains ringing the Tarim Basin never reaches an ocean. Most rivers running north from the Kunlun die in the sand, and the Tarim River itself ends in the salt…
399. There is no such thing as a London 0207 numberLondoners often write their numbers as 0207 or 0208, but the area code is simply 020 and the local part has eight digits. The mistake is a fossil of two great renumberings. Britai…
400. Malaria kept the Terai wild until DDT opened it to settlersAt the foot of the Himalayas lies a belt of marshy lowland, tall grass and sal forest called the Terai. For centuries its fevers and predators kept most outsiders away, leaving it…
401. The Mediterranean, Black Sea and Caspian are leftovers of one vanished oceanLong before the Alps and Himalayas rose, an ocean called the Tethys lay between the great southern and northern landmasses. As Africa, India and Arabia drifted north and slammed i…
402. Harry Potter made it possible to film Narnia in wartime BritainWhen a Narnia film was being developed at Paramount, the studio wanted it moved to America. Producers later credited Harry Potter with breaking down those cultural lines, and the …
403. Dreamtime may be a mistranslation that came back as everyday EnglishThe word Dreamtime was coined by two early anthropologists in Central Australia in the 1890s to render an Arrernte term. Critics soon argued it distorted the idea, which is less a…
404. Tidal bores send a wall of seawater racing upriver against the currentOn China's Qiantang River the incoming tide arrives as a wave up to 9 metres tall, charging upstream at around 40 kilometres an hour. It is the world's largest tidal bore, a rare …
405. The spotted tiger quoll packs one of the strongest bites for its sizeA male tiger quoll weighs about as much as a house cat's smaller cousin, around 3.5 kilograms, yet relative to its size it has the second most powerful bite of any living mammalia…
406. India's tiger reserves helped wild tiger numbers more than double since 2006In 2006 India counted just 1,411 wild tigers, the lowest figure ever recorded. By 2022 the census found 3,682, roughly 70 percent of all the wild tigers on Earth. Much of that rec…
407. Time's Person of the Year began as a fix for a missed coverIn 1927 Time embarrassed itself by failing to put Charles Lindbergh on its cover after his transatlantic flight. Facing slow news days before New Year, the editors found a way to …
408. Tippu Tip, the slave trader European explorers relied on in Central AfricaHenry Morton Stanley and David Livingstone both depended on help from Tippu Tip, the most notorious ivory and slave trader in nineteenth-century Africa. In 1887 Stanley even arran…
409. Thoothukudi, India's Pearl City, has traded by sea for two thousand yearsPearl divers off Korkai, near modern Thoothukudi, were famous enough to appear in Ptolemy's geography, which described trade linking India with Roman Alexandria. Two millennia lat…
410. The Tasmanian tiger looked like a dog but carried a pouchThe last known thylacine died at Hobart Zoo on 7 September 1936. Striped like a tiger and shaped like a wolf, it was actually a marsupial, and both males and females had pouches. …
411. Transoxiana: the land beyond the Oxus that every empire wantedBetween two great Central Asian rivers lies a stretch of dry but fertile plain that Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Chinese and Mongols all fought to hold. Its Latin name means simply th…
412. The Steelers traded up eleven places to grab Troy PolamaluIn the 2003 draft, San Diego needed a safety, held the 15th pick and passed on Troy Polamalu. Pittsburgh jumped from 27th to 16th to take him. He spent all twelve of his professio…
413. How a string of truces with Britain became the United Arab EmiratesThe sheikhdoms along the southern Gulf coast got their old name from a series of truces signed with Britain in the 19th century. For about 150 years they sat under an ambiguous Br…
414. Topographic maps were born as military tools for planning battlesThose wavy contour lines joining points of equal height began as military intelligence: armies needed to know the lie of the land for battles and defences, which is why Britain's …
415. Why Everest's South Summit, taller than K2, isn't a mountainEverest's South Summit stands higher than K2, the world's second-highest mountain, yet nobody counts it as a separate peak. The reason is prominence: how far you must descend from…
416. Tornado Alley has no official borders, and it may be moving eastTornado Alley sounds like a place you could find on a map, yet the National Weather Service has never drawn its edges. The nickname began as the title of a 1952 Air Force research…
417. Toruń, Copernicus's birthplace, where citizens took their castle apart brick by brickIn 1454 the people of Toruń, fed up with the Teutonic Knights, stormed the Order's castle and dismantled its walls brick by brick, sparing only one tower, later used to hold gunpo…
418. Toto was a band of session players who already played on everythingBefore Toto had a name, its members were the hired hands behind records by Steely Dan, Boz Scaggs and Sonny & Cher. So when bassist David Hungate pointed out that the Latin phrase…
419. The Alaska pipeline must keep oil moving or it could freeze solidAn 800-mile steel pipe carries crude from Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic coast to the port of Valdez. It was built to deliver more than 2 million barrels a day, but now runs at around …
420. The perch is Finland's national fish and an Australian pestIn Finland the striped, red-finned perch is the national fish, and it even grows fat on Baltic herring in the country's brackish coastal waters. In Australia, where it was introdu…

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