› added 5 years ago

163

TIL of Kelly, a dolphin whose trainers gave her fish for bringing them litter/dead gulls to clean her pool. She started hiding fish under a rock in her pool, then used fish to lure gulls which she brought to her trainers to get more fish. She taught her calf the strategy, who taught more calves.

mxayo TIL there was a country called United States of Central America, formed by El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras. That country was formed in August 1898 and dissolved in November of that year,
d8GxQ TIL an American in the early 1900s dredged the Sacred Cenote in Chichén Itzá and illegally smuggled to the US nearly 30,000 Mayan artifacts found at the bottom of the cenote. The bulk of the find is in a storage room in the Peabody Museum at Harvard.
Oxea TIL Verge magazine paid a technology writer to spend one year without going online in order to discover “what the internet has done to me over the years”. In that time he wrote half a novel, lost 15 pounds, and found the lack of constant stimulation drove him to do things he cared about
yVdDe TIL Little Ice Age (16th - 19th century) led to bad harvests, hunger & starvation for millions of people; increased disease and crime. The 17th century was marked by pronounced political instability and upheaval, such as the English revolutions & wars in Spain, Italy, China, and the Ottoman Empire.
66OW TIL that a Roman merchant who sold fake jewels was sentenced to face a lion in the arena. When the gate finally opened, a chicken walked out. Emperor Gallienus proclaimed “He practiced deceit and then had it practiced on him.”