Intellect Plus

Topics

Technology

1,432 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 12 of 24.

  1. 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…
  2. 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…
  3. 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 …
  4. 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. …
  5. 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…
  6. 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…
  7. 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…
  8. 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…
  9. 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…
  10. 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 …
  11. 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…
  12. 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…
  13. 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 …
  14. 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…
  15. 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…
  16. 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%,…
  17. 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 …
  18. 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 …
  19. 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…
  20. 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…
  21. 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…
  22. 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 …
  23. 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…
  24. 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…
  25. 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…
  26. 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…
  27. 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…
  28. 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…
  29. 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 …
  30. 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…
  31. 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…
  32. 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…
  33. 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…
  34. 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…
  35. 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…
  36. 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…
  37. 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…
  38. 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 …
  39. 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 …
  40. 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…
  41. 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…
  42. 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…
  43. 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…
  44. Your fizzy drink bottle and your fleece jacket are the same plasticCall it polyester when it is woven into clothes and PET when it is moulded into bottles. Either way it is one of the world's most common plastics, with 31 million tons produced in…
  45. Pontiac was meant as Oakland's sidekick and swallowed its parent within seven yearsGeneral Motors launched Pontiac in 1926 as a cheaper companion to its Oakland cars. The newcomer sold so well that by 1933 Oakland was gone. Pontiac lasted until a white G6 rolled…
  46. The Lotus Elise proved that shedding weight beats adding horsepowerThe first Lotus Elise had just 118 brake horsepower, modest even for a family hatchback, yet it reached 60 mph in 5.8 seconds. The trick was weight: only 725 kg. The car took its …
  47. Chilling natural gas to minus 162 shrinks it six hundredfoldNatural gas is bulky and hard to keep from leaking, which is why oil drillers long treated it as an unwanted byproduct. Cool it to about minus 162 °C, though, and it condenses int…
  48. Why the gas in your barbecue bottle changes with the seasonsThe propane and butane sold as LPG is not one fixed recipe. Suppliers in the northern hemisphere add more propane in winter and more butane in summer, because the two boil at very…
  49. The fastest production car depends on what you call productionIn 2010 a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport averaged 431.072 km/h over two runs, yet within three years Guinness declared the record invalid, then said it was under review, then confirme…
  50. The cheaper, safer battery chemistry quietly taking over electric carsLithium iron phosphate batteries store less energy per kilogram than the nickel-rich cells in premium electric cars. They win anyway on price, safety and lifespan, using iron and …
  51. Lockheed hid a whole aircraft factory under a fake painted suburbDuring the Second World War, Lockheed's Burbank plant vanished beneath an enormous painted tarpaulin showing a sleepy neighbourhood, complete with rubber cars, fake fire hydrants …
  52. The Dodgers left Brooklyn after a fight over one stadium siteWalter O'Malley wanted to build a new ballpark with his own money at Atlantic and Flatbush avenues in Brooklyn. The city's powerful planner Robert Moses refused to assemble the la…
  53. Los Angeles ripped out its streetcars, then spent decades rebuilding railEarly 20th-century Southern California had more than 1,000 miles of streetcar and interurban track. By 1963 every line was gone, replaced by buses. Twenty-seven years later, choke…
  54. Lidar measures the world by timing how long reflected light takes to returnFire a laser pulse, wait for the reflection, multiply the round-trip time by the speed of light and halve it. That simple trick, first tried for tracking satellites in 1961, now m…
  55. How a 1583 London wager grew into the mathematics of modern life insuranceOn 18 June 1583, at London's Royal Exchange, Richard Martin paid thirteen merchants 30 pounds. If William Gybbons died within a year, Martin would collect 400. It is the earliest …
  56. Light rail is the streetcar that cities scrapped and then reinventedAfter the 1950s, cities across Britain and America ripped out their trams in favour of cars and buses. West Germany upgraded its networks instead, adding tunnels, bigger vehicles …
  57. The limousine may owe its name to a French shepherd's cloakNobody is quite sure how a region of central France lent its name to the chauffeured luxury car. One theory points to a carriage roof shaped like the hooded cloaks of Limousin she…
  58. The first car designed purely to win rallies, and it didTo win Lancia's business, the designer Nuccio Bertone built a wild wedge-shaped concept on a friend's Fulvia running gear and drove it to the factory, passing underneath the gate …
  59. Michigan lawmakers picked Lansing as capital out of sheer frustrationIn 1847 Michigan had to move its capital away from Detroit, uncomfortably close to British Canada. Ann Arbor, Marshall and Jackson all lobbied hard. Deadlocked, the state House pr…
  60. The heavy 1859 battery that still starts nearly every car engineGaston Planté rolled two lead sheets into a spiral, soaked them in dilute sulfuric acid, and in 1859 created the first battery you could recharge by pushing current backwards thro…

Open the feed