› added 6 years ago

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TIL the etymology of 'butternut squash' comes from the 1940's description, "smooth as butter, sweet as nut".

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d8G67 TIL: Dennis Rodman only has 28 siblings, previously thought to be 46, according to his father Philander.
GY94G TIL the name of the metal cobalt comes from the kobold, a troublesome Germanic spirit that miners blamed for making cobalt ores poisonous.
woAB8 TIL about the Cerutti Mastodon Site. A site that some researchers claim shows evidence of some type of hominid living in N. America ~130,000 years ago. The previous estimate was only ~24,000 years ago.
WkDg8 TIL 16 months before he died, the Genie Awards offended John Candy with an unauthorized ad, calling him "The Biggest Star They Could Find" to host their award show.
XpB8 TIL Some older/less efficient worker termites will develop ‘backpacks’ of toxic chemicals that explode when the termite is threatened. They are essentially used as suicide bombers when the colony is being attacked.