› added 10 months ago

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TIL Car tires are major source of ocean microplastics and more than 200,000 tonnes of tiny plastic particles are blown from roads into the oceans every year

Read more theguardian.com

via reddit.com

vwl4 TIL Spring gets 30 seconds shorter every year due to a wobble in the Earth’s axis. Astronomer L. Gerstman: “The shift in the time of the vernal equinox becomes more apparent. Spring will be shortest in the year 8680, (88.5 days), or 4 days shorter than this year’s.” After that it will lengthen again
nB4r TIL that an Ethiopian girl was brutally beaten by seven men, until a pride of lions chased the men away and proceeded to stay with and protect the girl until help arrived.
KOnQ6 TIL of the United States Army Pigeon Service whose pigeons were trained for communication and reconnaissance purposes during WWII. During the war, the force consisted of 54,000 war pigeons and over 90% of their messages were received successfully (with some earning medals for saving Allied lives).
X05DQ TIL: During the 18 months of the Great Plague (1665-1666), Isaac Newton conceived calculus, set foundations for his theory of light and color, theory of gravity, worked on laws of planetary motion and wrote many papers creating the foundations of early calculus.
ANrwa TIL that the McGurk Effect shows how our brains integrate visual and auditory information for speech perception. If the visual information of a speaker’s mouth movements doesn’t match the sound, our brains may perceive a completely different sound.