Intellect Plus
Science
1,604 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 6 of 27.
- The biggest gibbon sings through a throat pouch as large as its headSiamangs, the largest gibbons, carry an inflatable throat sac that swells to the size of their heads and turns their calls into booming songs. Their singing rings out across Sumat…
- A drug named after Easter Island started life as a failed antifungalIn 1972 scientists isolated a compound from soil bacteria collected on Easter Island and named it rapamycin, after Rapa Nui. It was meant to fight fungi. Instead it turned out to …
- Most of your serotonin works in your gut, not your brainSerotonin is famous as a brain chemical, yet about 90 percent of the body's supply is made in the digestive tract, where it keeps the intestines moving. Only 1 to 2 percent sits i…
- The platypus decides sex with ten chromosomes, not twoHumans rely on a single X and Y pairing, but the platypus carries five X chromosomes and five Y chromosomes that link into chains during cell division. Its system shares nothing w…
- Across dozens of psychological traits, men and women mostly overlapWhen psychologist Janet Shibley Hyde pooled 46 meta-analyses in 2005, she found 78 percent of the measured gaps between men and women were small or close to zero. Averages can dif…
- The world's first institute of sexual science lasted fourteen years before Nazis wrecked itIn 1919 Magnus Hirschfeld opened an institute in Berlin devoted to studying human sexuality, with a library of over 20,000 volumes and 35,000 photographs. Visitors came from acros…
- Thermal cameras undercut the belief that women take longer to become arousedA common assumption holds that women need far more time than men to become aroused. Researchers at McGill University Health Centre in Montreal tested it with thermal imaging, trac…
- Surveys of partner counts run into a problem mathematicians spotted long agoMen on average report more lifetime sexual partners than women. Mathematicians point out that, among heterosexual people, this cannot be true on average, since every such pairing …
- Studying private daydreams forces researchers to trust what people admitSexual fantasies appear in societies all over the world, yet measuring them is notoriously tricky. Scientists must rely on checklists, written accounts or diaries, each skewed by …
- Robert Greene worked about 50 jobs before The 48 Laws of PowerBefore he became famous for dissecting power, Robert Greene estimates he held around 50 jobs, from construction worker and translator to Hollywood screenwriter. A chance meeting a…
- The fertility pioneer who briefly quit medicine to direct theatreRobert Winston qualified as a doctor in 1964, then stepped away from clinical work long enough to win a directing award at the 1969 Edinburgh Festival. He returned to medicine and…
- Toumaï, a seven-million-year-old skull, and the thigh bone nobody mentionedIn July 2001 a team combing Chad's Djurab Desert picked up a crushed skull roughly seven million years old. Nicknamed Toumaï, it was hailed as perhaps the oldest known member of t…
- Why many mammals keep their testicles outside the body, and whales don'tSperm production works best a couple of degrees cooler than the rest of the body, so many mammals hang the testes outside in an adjustable sac. Muscles raise or lower it as the ai…
- Your skin's oil glands work by destroying their own cellsTiny glands beside almost every hair follicle coat your skin and hair in sebum, a waxy mix found nowhere else in the body. They make it in a strikingly self-destructive way: the p…
- Seizures range from a blank stare to full convulsions, and neurologists sort them by originNot every seizure looks like the dramatic convulsions of film and television. Some are a few seconds of vacant staring, a sudden smell that isn't there, or an overwhelming sense o…
- The world's smallest monkey babbles like a human baby and taps trees for gumWeighing just over 100 grams, the pygmy marmoset is the smallest monkey on Earth. It chews holes in Amazon tree bark and laps up the gum that oozes out. Its infants babble their w…
- Quartzite is sandstone squeezed so hard it breaks straight through its grainsTake pure quartz sandstone, bury it inside a colliding mountain belt, and heat and pressure fuse its grains into an interlocking mosaic. The result, quartzite, is so tightly knit …
- Retroviruses write themselves into our DNA, and some never leftMost genetic information flows from DNA to RNA. Retroviruses run the process backwards, turning their RNA into DNA and stitching it into the genome of the cells they infect. Ancie…
- The man who named the dinosaurs once dined inside oneOn New Year's Eve 1853, anatomist Richard Owen hosted 21 leading scientists for dinner inside a hollow concrete Iguanodon. Owen had coined the word Dinosauria, founded London's Na…
- Before DNA and proteins, life may have run entirely on RNAEvery living cell needs DNA to store instructions, RNA to carry them and proteins to do the work, and none functions without the others. That chicken-and-egg puzzle led scientists…
- Polysaccharides are sugar chains that became fuel, armour and paperPolysaccharides are long chains of simple sugars, sometimes thousands of units long. Linked one way they become starch in potatoes or glycogen in your liver, ready to be burned; b…
- Prader–Willi syndrome shows why it matters which parent a gene came fromFor a handful of genes on chromosome 15, only the copy inherited from the father does any work; the mother's is silenced. Lose the father's version and Prader–Willi syndrome follo…
- The prefrontal cortex, your brain's mental sketchpad for goals and self-controlAt the very front of the brain sits the region that holds plans in mind, weighs consequences and stops you blurting out what you shouldn't. The prefrontal cortex is so hard to pin…
- Did humans always wage war, or did farming and settling down invent it?Hobbes pictured life before civilisation as a war of all against all, and Rousseau fired back that it was nothing of the kind. Centuries later, archaeologists digging through anci…
- Lice, sweat and a lost gene reveal when humans shed fur and dressedFor most of our history as a species, people went naked, probably for at least 90,000 years before anyone invented clothes. Working out when fur vanished and garments arrived has …
- How a floppy string of amino acids folds itself into a working machineEvery protein leaves the ribosome as a limp chain, yet within milliseconds many snap into an exact three-dimensional shape, and some manage it in a few microseconds. The instructi…
- Hot deserts cover about 14 percent of Earth's land, the biggest climate zoneThe hot desert is the most widespread climate on land, covering roughly 14.2% of Earth's land area and found on every continent except Antarctica. What makes a desert isn't heat, …
- The deviled egg began in 13th-century Andalusia, long before mayonnaise arrivedThe oldest known stuffed-egg recipe comes from an unnamed 13th-century cookbook from Andalusia, where yolks were beaten with coriander, onion juice and a fermented sauce called mu…
- A phenotype covers every trait but the genome, from blood groups to beaver damsBiologists split living things into two layers: the genotype, the inherited genetic material, and the phenotype, everything else that can be observed or measured. That second laye…
- Phosphate builds your bones, powers your cells and feeds the world's cropsMuch of the energy a cell uses comes from snapping phosphate groups off molecules like ATP. The same simple ion, one phosphorus atom ringed by four oxygens, hardens bones and teet…
- The kidney-bean-sized gland at the base of your brain that runs your hormonesTucked into a protective bony hollow at the base of the brain, the pituitary gland is about 1 cm across and weighs at most a gram. Yet with the hypothalamus above it, it steers gr…
- Ceviche is cooked without heat, because acid unfolds proteins just like fireBoil an egg and the clear, runny white turns firm and opaque. Pour raw egg white into acetone and much the same thing happens, no stove needed. Latin American cooks exploit the sa…
- Rats raised in darkness grow fewer spines on their visual neuronsYoung rats kept in the dark develop brain cells in their visual cortex with fewer tiny spines on their branches, and with branches laid out differently. Those branches are dendrit…
- Denis Noble put the heartbeat on a computer, then took on the geneIn 1960, while still a doctoral student in London, Denis Noble published the first mathematical simulation of the heart's electrical rhythm built on real experimental data. Decade…
- The first life-size nude woman in stone was carved in ancient AthensAround the fourth century BC, the Athenian sculptor Praxiteles carved Aphrodite of Knidos, the first life-size stone statue of a nude woman anyone knows of. The original has vanis…
- Bile works like washing-up liquid, breaking dinner's fat into tiny dropletsFat and water do not mix, which poses a problem for a gut that digests everything in a watery soup. The liver's answer is bile, a yellow-green fluid whose salts behave like deterg…
- Bill Bryson stayed in Britain after a job at a Surrey psychiatric hospitalIn 1973 a young Iowan backpacking through Europe took a job at a psychiatric hospital in Surrey and decided to stick around. There he met a nurse, Cynthia Billen, and married her.…
- Why having older brothers may nudge a boy's sexual orientationSince the 1990s researchers have found that the more sons a woman has, the likelier each later son is to be attracted to men. One proposed explanation involves the mother's immune…
- Creatinine, a humble muscle waste product, is how doctors read the kidneysYour muscles shed a steady trickle of a waste chemical called creatinine, at a rate set mostly by how much muscle you carry. Because healthy kidneys flush it out almost entirely a…
- CRISPR turned a bacterial defence against viruses into programmable genetic scissorsBacteria fight viruses by storing snippets of their DNA and using an enzyme to slice matching invaders. Scientists borrowed that trick. Pair the enzyme Cas9 with a custom guide RN…
- Why three in every hundred baby boys arrive with a testicle still hiddenTesticles form high inside the abdomen, near the kidneys, and must travel down into the scrotum before birth. Sometimes the journey stalls. About 3 percent of full-term boys and n…
- Some single nerve cells stretch from your spine all the way to your toesA nerve cell's axon is usually about a micrometre wide, yet the longest ones in your body, in the sciatic nerve, reach from the bottom of the spinal cord down to each big toe. Oth…
- Viruses that eat bacteria outnumber every living thing on Earth combinedThere may be more than ten million trillion trillion bacteriophages on the planet, more than all living organisms, bacteria included, put together. These viruses infect only bacte…
- No society has ever been found that ran on barter aloneEconomics textbooks often tell how early people swapped goods until the hassle drove them to invent money. Anthropologists have looked hard for such a society and never found one.…
- All the DNA base pairs on Earth would weigh about 50 billion tonnesScientists estimate that Earth holds around 5 times ten to the 37th power DNA base pairs, together weighing some 50 billion tonnes. Each pair is just two small molecules gripping …
- In archaeology, the present has been frozen at 1 January 1950When a scientist dates a bone to 1000 BP, the present they mean is not today. It is 1 January 1950, fixed permanently so that dates never drift. That makes 1000 BP the year 950 AD…
- Losing hurts about twice as much as winning feels goodIn a 1992 study, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky put a number on a very human quirk: losses sting roughly 2.25 times more than equal gains please. That lopsided feeling, called l…
- The same mathematical curves describe drumheads, radio waveguides and DNA's X-ray imagesStrike a drum and its skin ripples in patterns described by Bessel functions. The same family of curves governs radio waves inside a cylindrical waveguide, sound radiating from sp…
- Europe's first modern humans carved flutes from vulture bones 35,000 years agoIn a German cave in 2008, archaeologists found a flute made from a vulture's wing bone, pierced with five finger holes and roughly 35,000 to 40,000 years old, the oldest undispute…
- The Taung child proved humans evolved in Africa, and experts ignored itIn November 1924 the anatomist Raymond Dart opened two boxes of fossils from a South African lime quarry and found the face and natural brain cast of a young skull. Small-brained …
- Your autonomic nervous system quietly stops you fainting every time you stand upRising from a chair should make your blood pressure crash. It doesn't, because an unconscious control network instantly tightens your arteries to compensate. The same system adjus…
- Astrobiology hunts for alien life by studying the toughest life on EarthNo one has found life beyond Earth, yet a whole science is built on the premise that it may exist. Astrobiologists search Mars and icy moons for chemical traces while studying mic…
- The atomic force microscope sees surfaces by touch, not by lightOrdinary microscopes are limited by how light bends. The atomic force microscope sidesteps that entirely: it drags a tiny sharp tip across a surface and feels its bumps, resolving…
- Attachment theory made infant bonds central to psychology, and critics still push backJohn Bowlby argued that babies are built to cling to at least one reliable caregiver, and that this bond shapes emotional life for years. His idea became one of psychology's domin…
- Augustinians live by a rule written around 400 that prized sharing over povertyAugustine of Hippo drew up a short rule for his community in North Africa around the year 400. Sixteen centuries later, canons, friars and nuns still live by it, balancing study w…
- Is the fear of spiders wired in by evolution or picked up from culture?In lab tests, people spot a spider hidden among flowers faster than a flower hidden among spiders, and a fear of spiders can be conditioned after a single pairing. Yet in parts of…
- Ardi, a 4.4-million-year-old skeleton, walked upright yet grasped branches with her toesFound in Ethiopia's Afar desert and unveiled in 2009, the skeleton nicknamed Ardi belonged to a 50-kilogram female who lived more than a million years before Lucy. She had a small…
- Arizona State grew from a four-room teacher school into a 160,000-student giantIn 1886, 33 students started classes in a single four-room schoolhouse in Tempe, on land mostly donated by a local couple. Today Arizona State University counts 160,051 students, …
- The arrowhead may be 74,000 years old, and hobbyists still make a million a yearStone points from a South African cave, around 64,000 years old, still carry traces of blood, bone and the plant-resin glue that fixed them to shafts. Making that glue took real p…
- To an archaeologist, a carved bone is an artefact but a butchered one is notArchaeologists sort finds with surprising care. A pebble carried far from the river that rounded it is a manuport, a charred hearth stone is an ecofact, a hearth itself is a featu…