› added 5 years ago

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TIL that Oprah Winfrey has such a severe phobia of chewing gum that it's banned from her television studio and this includes audience members. It all stems from her grandmother leaving gum all around the house to save for a later chew. It didn't stop Reese Witherspoon from chewing it in front of her

epwdJ TIL: Some car commercials are done with CGI. This is done because these commercials are often shot before the cars have actually been manufactured. Also it’s much harder to move these cars to the shooting locations. They use a car called the Mill Blackbird for the CGI.
AD4Rg TIL the Indian pipe plant, also known as the ghost plant, contains and needs no chlorophyll giving it it's "ghost-like" appearance and allowing it to grow in the darkest parts of forests.
J1ykv TIL that our DNA is full of genes that no longer work. Called pseudogenes, many have "good" versions in other species. For example GULO allows most animals to make their own vitamin C. Our version is GULOP, and is broken. Freakily, there are about as many pseudogenes as working genes in human DNA.
l0Rr TIL that Choco Pies are banned in North Korea because they were getting too popular, and Kim Jung-un feared they would cause an uprising. Because of this, South Korea packed many Choco Pies in balloons and sent them over the boarder to North Korea.
a8n6N TIL English football (soccer) team Derby County's stadium from 1889 to 2003 was called the "Baseball Ground". It was originally built for baseball, which had a brief vogue in England in the 1890s, but the last baseball game played there was in 1898.