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1,389 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 11 of 24.

  1. Okinawa's old kingdom paid tribute to two empires at onceAfter Satsuma invaders captured its king in 1609, the Ryukyu Kingdom answered to Japan while still sending tribute to China. China traded only with tributary states, so the island…
  2. Quantum spin statistics once capped how brightly an OLED could glowInside an OLED pixel, electrons and holes pair into excitons that release light. Spin rules produce three triplet pairs for every singlet, and triplets decay only slowly because t…
  3. Titanic's fourth funnel was mostly for showThe original plan for White Star's giant liners had three stacks. Designers added a fourth to improve their appearance, and on all three sisters it was a dummy that vented galley …
  4. NAFTA began with Mexico's pitch and Canada's fear of being left outAfter Canada and the United States signed a free trade deal in 1988, Mexico's president Carlos Salinas de Gortari proposed a similar pact to attract investment following Latin Ame…
  5. North West England holds the country's highest peak and deepest lakeOne region of England collects most of its natural records. Scafell Pike in Cumbria, at 978 metres, is the country's highest summit. Windermere is its largest natural lake, Wast W…
  6. Northampton nearly had England's third university before Oxford and CambridgeIn 1261 Henry III granted Northampton a university by royal charter. Had it lasted, it would rank behind only Oxford and Cambridge in age. Four years later the king shut it down, …
  7. Nobody agrees where the North of England actually startsAsk southerners and northerners to draw the line between North and South, and southerners put it further south. Some jokingly start the North at the Watford Gap between Northampto…
  8. A reactor at sea cannot count on gravity to shut itself downOn land, a reactor's control rods can simply drop into place under gravity. A ship pitches and rolls, so marine reactors need shutdown systems that work at any angle. That is just…
  9. A tiny fraction of late neutrons is what makes reactors controllableMost neutrons from splitting uranium fly out instantly, but about 0.65 percent arrive late, released by fission products over milliseconds to minutes. That small delay is the whol…
  10. How nuclear testing moved from open skies to sealed shafts undergroundThe first atomic test lit the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, with the force of about 20 kilotons of TNT. Over the following decades more than 2,000 tests followed, first on t…
  11. Ayn Rand named Objectivism only because existentialism was already takenAyn Rand wanted to call her philosophy existentialism, since it rested on the primacy of existence over the mind. Another school had already claimed that label, so she settled on …
  12. The Nordic model pairs free trade and high taxes with unions almost everywhereIn 2019, 90.7 percent of Icelandic workers belonged to a union, against 16.3 percent in Germany and 9.9 percent in the United States. That density is one pillar of the Nordic mode…
  13. Norfolk still has 659 medieval churches, the densest cluster on EarthMedieval Norfolk grew so rich on farming and wool that it built more than a thousand churches. Some 659 still stand, more than in any other British county and reportedly the great…
  14. The Motorola Razr sold on looks alone, with ordinary insidesInside, the 2004 Motorola Razr V3 was nearly identical to the unremarkable V500 and V600 phones that preceded it. What changed was the shell: a startlingly thin aluminium flip bod…
  15. Hunter-gatherers in Louisiana raised earthworks before Egypt built its pyramidsArchaeologists long assumed that only farming societies with food surpluses could organise monumental building. Then radiocarbon dates from Watson Brake in northern Louisiana came…
  16. The first multinationals kept armies and ran colonial portsToday's global companies trace their lineage to chartered trading firms of the 1600s. The British East India Company, founded in 1600, did more than buy and sell: it appointed loc…
  17. One lost battle in 711 opened almost all of Visigothic SpainIn 711 a commander named Tariq ibn Ziyad sailed from North Africa to southern Spain. Watchers on shore reportedly mistook his ships for ordinary trading vessels. By July his army …
  18. Why city children who stay indoors are losing their distance visionAmong children in rural Nepal, nearsightedness affects around 1 percent. In some big Chinese cities the figure reaches 37 percent. Genes matter, but a difference that large points…
  19. The Near East got its name from British worries about RussiaBefore the 1850s, 'the far east' could mean any distant corner east of wherever you stood, even the far side of a village. Then the Crimean War pushed British officials to give th…
  20. Assyria's royal messengers outpaced every Middle Eastern courier until the 1800sHolding an empire that stretched from Iran to Egypt demanded fast news. The Neo-Assyrian kings built relay stations along well-kept roads, and their official messages crossed the …
  21. Neoliberalism began as a call for a strong state, then flipped meaningWhen a group of economists adopted the word neoliberalism in Paris in 1938, they meant markets guided by a strong and impartial state, a deliberate break from pure laissez-faire. …
  22. Alfred Nobel ended up taking his own explosive as heart medicineIn 1896, months before his death, Alfred Nobel's doctors put him on nitroglycerin for chest pain. He wrote to a friend about the irony of swallowing the substance that had made hi…
  23. The word kamikaze first meant the storms that wrecked Kublai Khan's fleetsLong before it named suicide pilots in the Second World War, kamikaze, meaning 'divine wind', described typhoons credited with destroying Mongol invasion fleets sent against Japan…
  24. Pesto, a Philippine island and a cannon all take their names from grinding toolsThe mortar and pestle is among humanity's oldest tools, and its vocabulary has spread everywhere. Italian pesto means made with the pestle. Luzon, the largest island in the Philip…
  25. Mandelbrot's warning: most risk managers mistake wild risk for mildSome dangers behave politely, clustering around an average so that big samples make them predictable. Others have fat tails, where one extreme event can dwarf everything before it…
  26. Robotaxis arrived years late and still lose moneyForecasters once expected driverless taxis to be widespread by 2018. That never happened. By 2025 services run by companies such as Waymo, Baidu, Pony.ai and Zoox were spreading q…
  27. Rochester, the canal boomtown that went from flour to flowers to filmRochester, New York, has reinvented itself several times. The Erie Canal turned a village by the Genesee River's waterfalls into America's first boomtown, and by 1838 it produced …
  28. The Radium Girls were told their glowing paint was harmlessIn the 1910s and 1920s, young American women painted watch dials with glowing radium paint, shaping their brushes between their lips to keep a fine tip. Their employers insisted t…
  29. Rare earths are not rare, just maddeningly hard to separateCerium, one of the 17 rare-earth elements, is more common in Earth's crust than copper. The name misleads: these metals are plentiful but spread thinly, locked in compounds and ch…
  30. Rattan is a climbing palm that can stretch hundreds of metresThe cane in a wicker chair comes from a palm, not a vine. Rattan is a group of roughly 600 climbing palm species from the tropical forests of Asia and Africa, whose hooked spines …
  31. The Renault Espace began as a rejected Chrysler ideaEurope's pioneering people carrier nearly never happened. Conceived at Chrysler UK in the 1970s and developed by Matra for Simca, the design was shelved by Peugeot as too risky. M…
  32. The Renault Twizy, a two-seat electric pod that 14-year-olds could driveRenault's Twizy was a tiny electric two-seater classed in Europe as a quadricycle, not a car. Its slowest version topped out at 45 km/h, so in several European countries teenagers…
  33. Why some companies pour over 40% of revenue into researchA typical American industrial firm spends around 3.5% of its revenue on research and development. Drugmakers such as Merck and Novartis spend about 14 to 15%, Ericsson almost 25%,…
  34. Malaysia's national carmaker once sold an Italian motorcycle maker for one euroIn July 2004 Malaysia's national carmaker Proton paid 70 million euros for a majority stake in the Italian motorcycle maker MV Agusta. Seventeen months later it handed the marque …
  35. Peugeot bought Chrysler's European arm for 76 pence and paid dearlyIn late 1978 Peugeot's parent company bought the struggling Chrysler Europe, formerly Rootes and Simca, for a nominal 76 pence plus its debts. The bargain turned sour. Relaunched …
  36. The volcanic rock that floats across oceans for yearsAfter Krakatoa erupted in 1883, rafts of floating stone covered kilometres of sea, in places piled 1.5 metres above the waterline. They drifted around the Indian Ocean for up to t…
  37. The giant water batteries that lose power yet still make moneyA pumped storage plant uses more electricity than it ever produces, losing up to 30 percent on each cycle. It still pays. Cheap surplus power at night lifts water uphill, and at p…
  38. Malted milk and the garbage disposal both came from one Wisconsin townA Lake Michigan factory town of under 80,000 people gave the world malted milk in 1887 and the kitchen garbage disposal in 1927. Racine, Wisconsin also built one of the earliest a…
  39. The small roadster that pulled Porsche out of its early 1990s slumpIn 1991 Porsche was in serious trouble, its 928 selling poorly and the 968 a heavy rework of an older car. Its answer was a cheaper mid-engine roadster that shared parts with the …
  40. Porsche tried to take over Volkswagen and got absorbed insteadIn 2009 the sports car maker Porsche controlled more than half of Volkswagen, a company many times its size, and was aiming for three quarters. Within months, buried under debts a…
  41. Why most nuclear plants keep their water too pressurised to boilInside the most common kind of nuclear reactor, water runs at about 315 degrees Celsius without boiling. The trick is pressure, around 155 times that of the atmosphere, and the sa…
  42. The first private detective agency was run by a former criminalThe world's first known private detective agency opened in Paris in 1833, founded by Eugene Francois Vidocq, a soldier, privateer and one-time criminal who staffed it with ex-conv…
  43. The factory computer named after its inventors' 84th projectIn 1968 a General Motors transmission plant wanted to stop rewiring walls of relays every time a production line changed. A small firm in Bedford, Massachusetts won the contract w…
  44. Porsche's four-cylinder 718 was quicker than before, and critics hated how it soundedWhen Porsche swapped the six-cylinder engines in its mid-engined Boxster and Cayman for turbocharged fours in 2016, the cars got faster and more economical. The motoring press sti…
  45. The Porsche 930 was built for racing rules and earned a grim nicknamePorsche built the first 911 Turbo mainly to satisfy racing paperwork, since new rules demanded 400 road cars before a racer could compete. Buyers loved it anyway. It was the faste…
  46. The 991 was only the third all-new platform in the 911's long historyPorsche rarely starts the 911 from scratch. The seventh generation, the 991, unveiled in September 2011, was only the third genuinely new platform since 1963. Its engineers moved …
  47. The Porsche 993 was the last 911 to be cooled by airThrough four generations, every Porsche 911 used an engine cooled by air rather than water. The 993, built from 1994 to 1998, was the final one. It also tamed the old 911's most n…
  48. The Porsche 911 was meant to be called the 901, until Peugeot objectedPorsche unveiled its new sports car at the 1963 Frankfurt show as the 901. Peugeot promptly protested: in France it held exclusive rights to three-digit car names with a zero in t…
  49. The Porsche 911 GT2 turned a racing requirement into the fastest 911The first 911 GT2 existed so Porsche could go racing; only 57 road cars were built to satisfy the rulebook. By its last generation the GT2 RS had become the most powerful producti…
  50. Porsche's plug-in hybrid 918 Spyder broke the Nürburgring's seven-minute barrierA plug-in hybrid that could creep silently through town on battery power was also, in September 2013, the first street-legal production car to lap the Nürburgring's long road cour…
  51. Porsche lost money on every 959 it sold, and changed its cars foreverWhen customers took delivery of the Porsche 959 in 1987, each paid 431,550 Deutschmarks, less than half of what the car cost Porsche to build. In return they got the world's faste…
  52. The Pontiac Fiero was a sports car disguised as a thrifty commuterGeneral Motors bosses did not want a two-seat sports car that might steal sales from the Corvette. So young Pontiac engineers pitched theirs as a frugal commuter that merely happe…
  53. How the Mustang created an entire class of car on its first dayFord expected to sell 100,000 Mustangs in the first year. On launch day in April 1964, dealers took 22,000 orders, and the company had to raise production at once. The runaway hit…
  54. The Lotus Exige squeezed ever more power from a small four-cylinder engineThe Lotus Exige began in 2000 as a hardtop Elise with a 177-horsepower engine. Within a decade Lotus had coaxed around 256 horsepower from a supercharged 1.8-litre unit while cutt…
  55. Chariot axles were greased with soap more than 3,000 years agoTraces of calcium soap have been found on chariot axles dating to 1400 BC, and the builders of the Egyptian pyramids slid their stones over timber soaked in oil. People have been …
  56. Most American pickup trucks spend their lives running errandsSurveys of Ford F-150 owners found that 87 percent often used their trucks for shopping and errands, while only 7 percent often towed anything. The pickup, once a bare-bones farm …
  57. Plaster of Paris is named after the hill beneath MontmartreThe white powder in a plaster cast gets its name from a big gypsum deposit under Montmartre, the hill in northern Paris. Heat that gypsum in a kiln, grind it, add water, and it se…
  58. The first hybrid car was built in 1899 and could be charged before a driveFerdinand Porsche's Lohner-Porsche Mixte of 1899 was the first hybrid electric car, and early hybrids like it could be topped up from an outside source. The plug-in idea then slep…
  59. The Plymouth Barracuda was a family Valiant in a sporty fastback disguiseChrysler knew Ford was preparing a sporty compact, so on a tight budget it gave its sensible Valiant a fastback and a giant wraparound rear window. The Barracuda went on sale on A…
  60. PCBs were too stable for their own good, and now they sink to ocean trenchesPolychlorinated biphenyls barely burn, resist acids and heat, and refuse to break down, which made them perfect for cooling transformers. Those same traits turned them into one of…

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