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TIL that coffee is credited with helping to spark the Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th century Europe. Before coffee was introduced to that part of the world, people often drank beer/alcohol throughout the day because it was safer than water. Coffee provided a safe alternative to alcohol.

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via reddit.com

E1Kg7 TIL that the Postal Service once printed 3 billion stamps featuring the Statue of Liberty, before realizing that the picture was actually of the Las Vegas replica
AD9Nn TIL Tokyo has its own superhero. He’s Mangetsu-Man, a self-made hero who’s taken up the responsibility of keeping the city clean. He wears a “full moon” head, purple bodysuit, oversized UGG boots with matching gloves, and uses a voice dictation app to hide his voice.
a88Ob TIL the average meat eater consumes 7,000 animals in their lifetime. It breaks down to 11 cows, 27 pigs, 2,400 chickens, 80 turkeys, 30 sheep and 4,500 fish
6E96X You’re in luck. For their senior project, two Cornell University computer-engineering whizzes recently built a machine that does just that. After learning in class how breathalyzers work, Robert Clain and Miguel Salas assembled a fart detector from a sensitive hydrogen sulfide monitor, a thermometer and a microphone and wrote the software that would rate the emission. A “slight perturbance in the air” near the detector sets it to work measuring the three pillars of fart quality: stench, temperature and sound. Temperature, Clain explains, is critical.
16Bb8 TIL that If two pieces of similar metals touch in a vacuum, and if both pieces are perfectly flat and polished, they will indeed fuse to effectively make one new piece. This is called cold welding.