› added 1 year ago

158

TIL ostriches, the fastest and largest extant bipedal terrestrial animal, can run for 30 minutes at 50 km/h (31.1 mph) and can also move at a speed of 70 km/h (43.5 mph) for short sprints. Interestingly, unlike other birds, ostriches have only two toes on each foot.

Read more ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

via reddit.com

MeggK TIL of the Benjamin Franklin effect that causes people to like someone more after doing them a favor. When Franklin asked his rival for a rare book and returned it with a note of thanks, Franklin’s rival spoke to him with great civility and offered help, leading the two men to become good friends.
e0xOb TIL Lily Allen wrote a song dissing her brother Alfie in 2007, criticizing him for his lazy behavior. Since then he's done well for himself best known for playing Theon Greyjoy in HBO's Game of Thrones.
R5lmQ TIL: The U.S. intelligence community actively monitored for decades the diplomatic and military communications of numerous Latin American nations through encryption machines supplied by a Swiss company that was secretly owned by the CIA.
v1Q9j TIL that Johnny Cash once got into a fight with an ostrich and lost. The ostrich broke two of his ribs and left him with a massive cut on his stomach.
LQyy0 TIL that the psychiatrist Henry Cotton would sometimes extract all of a patient's teeth as he believed infected teeth to be the cause of psychiatric disorders. If that didn't work, he'd remove testicles, ovaries, gall bladders, stomachs, spleens, cervixes and colons.