Intellect Plus
Nature
2,233 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 9 of 38.
- Indonesia speaks about a tenth of the world's languages across 17,000 islandsMore than half of Indonesia's roughly 284 million people live on Java, making it the most crowded island on Earth. Yet the country is also a linguistic giant, with 737 regional la…
- A common muscle relaxer is one double bond away from an antidepressantCyclobenzaprine, long sold as Flexeril, was prescribed more than 13 million times in the United States in 2023. Chemically it is almost identical to the antidepressant amitriptyli…
- Dakota Fanning joined the Oscar academy at 12, its youngest memberAt seven, Dakota Fanning became the youngest person ever nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award, for playing Sean Penn's daughter in I Am Sam. Five years later the Academy of M…
- Digital cash was dreamed up a quarter century before bitcoin arrivedIn 1983, long before bitcoin, cryptographer David Chaum conceived of ecash, a form of encrypted electronic money that third parties could not trace. He launched it through a compa…
- Comb jellies may be the oldest surviving branch of the animal family treeComb jellies row through the sea on beating bands of tiny hairs, and at up to 1.5 metres long they are the biggest animals to swim that way. Some biologists argue that their linea…
- Pink curing salt is dyed so nobody mistakes it for table saltCuring salt, a mix of ordinary salt with nitrates or nitrites, is often coloured pink on purpose. None of its ingredients is naturally pink; the dye simply keeps it from being con…
- The curlew's scientific name means new moon, after its crescent billCurlews probe mud with long, slender bills that curve downward, and their genus name, Numenius, seems to come from the Greek words for new and moon, a nod to that crescent shape. …
- Cuttlefish start watching the world, and possibly picking prey, before they hatchA cuttlefish's eyes appear to be fully formed before it leaves the egg, and the embryo starts looking around from inside. Hatchlings may then prefer to hunt whatever prey they saw…
- Evolution has invented the crab more than once, from different starting pointsCrabs are not one family tree. The crab shape, with a flat armoured shell, the tail tucked under the body and a knack for scuttling sideways, has arisen independently in several l…
- The crescent was a moon symbol for thousands of years before IslamAkkadian cylinder seals from as early as 2300 BC already show a crescent standing for the moon god Nanna. The same curved shape later crowned Greek goddesses, marked silver for al…
- Crinoids are animals shaped like lilies that eat with their mouths facing upA crinoid looks like a flower on a stalk, and its name comes from the Greek word for lily. It is really an echinoderm, a cousin of starfish and sea urchins, but turned the other w…
- Most of the world's critically endangered species are plants, not animalsAs of March 2026, the IUCN Red List classed 10,774 species as critically endangered, about 6.2% of everything it assesses. Plants make up 6,445 of them, nearly 60%, far outnumberi…
- Some animals hide by smell or sound, not only by colourTrained dogs and meerkats, both of which hunt by scent, struggle to find puff adders. The snake ambushes its meals and must stay hidden from its own enemies too, so it seems to ma…
- The slow worm is neither slow, nor a worm, nor a snakeEurope's slow worm looks like a small snake, yet it is a legless lizard that blinks with movable eyelids. Even its name misleads: the slow part comes from an Old English word for …
- Vampire bats share meals with roost mates who have fed them beforeA vampire bat that returns hungry can be saved by a roost mate regurgitating blood for it. Studies in Costa Rica found this sharing depends on long friendships and repayment: the …
- Conch shells have been played as trumpets from Ice Age caves to Grenada's fish marketsCut a hole near the tip of a large sea snail's shell and it becomes a horn; push your hand deeper into the opening and the note drops. A shell found in a Pyrenees cave in 1932 had…
- A river toll dispute drew the first state line across the Connecticut RiverIn the 1640s Hartford tried to tax Springfield's boats passing its fort at the Connecticut River's mouth. Boston retaliated by charging Connecticut ships to enter its harbour, and…
- If evolution's tape were rewound, would it reinvent eyes, wings and intelligence?Stephen Jay Gould argued in 1989 that replaying the history of life would produce a very different result. Simon Conway Morris disagrees, pointing to how often unrelated creatures…
- Copepods, barely two millimetres long, may outweigh every other animal groupCopepods are tiny crustaceans, usually 1 to 2 millimetres long and nearly transparent, yet some scientists think they form the largest animal biomass on the planet. Each night man…
- Australia's Coral Sea territory spans 780,000 square kilometres but only 7 of landThe Coral Sea Islands Territory covers an ocean area larger than many countries, yet its scattered cays and reefs add up to about 7 square kilometres of dry ground. The highest po…
- Ireland exported corned beef for centuries while most Irish people rarely ate itCorned beef and cabbage on Saint Patrick's Day is an Irish-American habit, not an Irish national dish. For centuries Irish ports shipped salted beef across the British Empire, but…
- The brain's biggest bridge has attracted a century of overconfident theoriesThe corpus callosum, a band of 200 to 300 million nerve fibres joining the brain's two halves, has been a magnet for bold claims. In 1906 an anatomist tied its size to intellect, …
- Raccoon dogs only conquered Europe once their fathers came alongWhen fur farmers first released pregnant raccoon dogs into the wild in 1928, few took hold. From 1929 they released pairs instead, and the species spread across much of Europe. Th…
- Flying lemurs neither fly nor count as lemurs, yet sit next to primatesColugos are often called flying lemurs, which is wrong twice over: they glide rather than fly, and they are not lemurs. Their webbed fingers once had scientists grouping them with…
- Dogs may have started as freeloaders at the edge of human campsCommensalism, a word rooted in the Latin for sharing a table, describes a partnership where one species gains and the other barely notices. Many researchers think the dog began ex…
- Why the blackbird got its name when crows and ravens are black tooEngland has plenty of black birds, from crows and rooks to ravens and jackdaws, so why did one thrush claim the name blackbird, first written down in 1486? In older English, bird …
- The cuckoo dresses like a hawk so it can sneak its eggs into nestsA female cuckoo may visit as many as 50 nests in a season, leaving eggs for other birds to raise. To get close, she looks like a predator: grey back and barred belly, much like a …
- A one-ton antelope that clicks as it walks and can clear 2.5 metresHerds of eland announce themselves with a strange clicking. One explanation is that these antelopes are so heavy their split hooves spread apart under the load and snap together a…
- Male green bottle flies find partners by the flicker of sunlight on wingsA male green bottle fly identifies a young female by timing the glints of sunlight flashing through her beating wings. In a 2017 experiment, males chose a light diode blinking 178…
- The chirping gecko on your porch light is quietly conquering the tropicsIn warm countries, a small lizard stalking moths around a porch lamp and chirping is usually the common house gecko. Harmless to people, it has hitched rides on cargo from its Asi…
- The common krait's bite can be so painless that sleepers never wakeMost dangerous snakes announce a bite with pain and swelling. South Asia's common krait often does not. Its fangs are small and its venom causes almost no damage at the site, so a…
- The colossal squid's giant eyes seem built to spot sperm whales comingThe colossal squid of the Southern Ocean has the biggest eyes of any animal known, up to about 30 centimetres across. A swordfish of similar weight manages with roughly 10. One id…
- A cockatiel's crest broadcasts its mood like a feathered dialWatch the crest of a cockatiel and you can read its feelings. Straight up means startled or excited, a gentle slant means relaxed, and flat against the head means angry or defensi…
- The 'cockles of your heart' may owe their name to a heart-shaped shellfishSeen end-on, a cockle's ribbed shell looks like a heart, and the family's type genus, Cardium, takes its name from the Latin for heart. That may explain why good news 'warms the c…
- Tiny Iceland beat the Royal Navy in every round of the Cod WarsIceland had a handful of patrol boats and one flying boat. Britain sent dozens of warships to guard its trawlers. Yet each clash over fishing grounds between 1958 and 1976 ended i…
- Coho salmon were shipped to the Great Lakes to eat an invasive fishA Pacific fish now swims in every one of the Great Lakes. Coho salmon were first released into Lake Erie in the 1920s to control alewives, and large-scale stocking began in 1966 w…
- A Portuguese man o' war is a colony pretending to be one animalThe Portuguese man o' war looks like a single jellyfish, but it is really a colonial organism: many connected individuals, each specialised for tasks such as feeding, reproduction…
- One elephant species sits on two different lists of the wildlife trade treatyUnder CITES, the global treaty policing trade in wild plants and animals, African bush elephants from Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe get lighter protection than thos…
- Mushrooms are closer cousins to animals than to plantsSorting living things by looks once seemed obvious. Then biologists began grouping organisms strictly by ancestry, into clades made of one ancestor plus every one of its descendan…
- The word 'classical' began as a Roman ranking of citizens by wealthBefore it meant timeless literature, classis was a naval fleet and a property bracket in Roman society, used to sort army draftees from first class to fifth. A writer called class…
- Coatis can swivel their ankles far enough to climb down trees headfirstThe coati, a long-snouted raccoon relative of the Americas, can turn its ankles beyond 180 degrees, so it descends tree trunks nose-first. Its pig-like snout rotates up to 60 degr…
- Billions of sterile flies drove a livestock parasite out of North AmericaA female New World screwworm fly mates just once and stores that sperm for life. Scientists exploited this quirk by breeding flies in factories, sterilising them with radiation an…
- The Alpine chough nests higher than any other bird on EarthClimbers on Mount Everest have been followed by Alpine choughs at 8,200 metres. This glossy black crow with a yellow bill has nested at 6,500 metres, higher than any other bird, a…
- Medieval scholars tried to count every demon, and loved the number sixIn 1467 Alonso de Espina announced that there were exactly 133,316,666 demons. A century later Johann Weyer counted 4,439,622, sorted into 666 legions of 6,666 each under 66 ruler…
- The cinereous vulture is Europe and Asia's giant with barn door wingsWith wings spanning up to 3.1 metres and a weight of up to 12.5 kilograms, the cinereous vulture is the largest Old World vulture and one of the heaviest flying birds alive. One w…
- The mouse-deer is the smallest hoofed mammal, and not a deer at allThe Java mouse-deer stands about 30 centimetres tall, making it the smallest living hoofed mammal. Despite the name, chevrotains are not close relatives of true deer. They have no…
- Chiba, the prefecture named for a thousand leaves beside TokyoMost international travellers to Japan land in Chiba, not Tokyo, since Narita Airport sits there. The prefecture's name is written with characters meaning thousand and leaf, and i…
- Chiikawa began as one artist's wish to become a small crying creatureIn May 2017 the illustrator Nagano tweeted that they longed to leave modern life behind and live as a simple little being that weeps over troubles, flees them, naps and dances. Th…
- The Chinese zodiac animals probably began as memory aids, not a raceLegend says the Jade Emperor ranked twelve animals by the order they crossed a river, and the rat won by riding the ox and leaping ahead. Historians suggest a plainer origin: peop…
- Chinook salmon swim over 3,000 kilometres up the Yukon to spawnThe largest of the Pacific salmon can top 59 kilograms, and some make astonishing journeys home. Yukon River Chinook travel more than 3,000 kilometres from the Bering Sea to spawn…
- Non-biting midges are everywhere, and Antarctica's largest land animal is oneThey look like mosquitoes, go by names like chizzywinks and Canadian soldiers, and emerge in clouds thick enough to coat windshields. Yet chironomid midges cannot bite. With well …
- Chitons see through thousands of tiny eyes built into their shellsA chiton looks like a slow, armoured oval clamped to a rock. Its shell is made of eight overlapping plates, and in some species it is studded with thousands of tiny eyes whose len…
- Colour-blind octopuses and squid are masters of colour camouflageOctopuses, squid and cuttlefish have just one type of light receptor in their eyes, so most of them are thought to be colour blind. Yet they can repaint their skin in milliseconds…
- Horned dinosaurs carried a beak bone found in no other animalEvery ceratopsian, from tiny Psittacosaurus to Triceratops, had a toothless bone at the tip of its upper jaw called the rostral, which no other animal possesses. Paired with a mat…
- The kissing bug spreads Chagas disease through its droppings, not its biteTriatomine insects, nicknamed kissing bugs, feed at night and favour moist skin near the eyes or mouth. The bite itself does not deliver the parasite behind Chagas disease. The bu…
- An Austrian emperor swapped chamois for New Zealand ferns and birdsIn 1907 Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria sent New Zealand eight Alpine chamois in exchange for living ferns, rare birds and lizards. After a sea voyage and a rail journey, the go…
- Egypt's sacred cat mummies ended up as fertiliser in LiverpoolAncient Egyptians buried cats by the hundreds of thousands, embalmed and wrapped as offerings to the goddess Bastet. When a shipment of thousands of animal mummies reached Liverpo…
- Cebu is where Magellan's voyage around the world lost MagellanIn April 1521 Ferdinand Magellan planted a wooden cross on Cebu's shore and saw the local ruler Rajah Humabon baptised with about 400 of his people. Less than two weeks later Mage…
- Cells were named for monks' rooms, and one bacterium is visible unaidedWhen Robert Hooke peered through a microscope in 1665, the tiny compartments he saw reminded him of monks' rooms in a monastery, so he called them cells, from the Latin for small …
- Carpet sharks range from a 30-centimetre bottom dweller to the whale sharkThe biggest fish on Earth and a shark small enough to hold in two hands belong to the same order. Carpet sharks take their name from the intricate patterns many of them wear, mark…