› added 12 years ago

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TIL Ray Bradbury wrote a short story where a time traveling safari hunter accidentally crushes a butterfly under his boot in the Cretaceous period, thereby changing the course of history millions of years later. He wrote the story two decades before the term “Butterfly Effect” first came into use.

69ERY TIL when Wolves were reintroduced to Yellow stone national park in 1995, the population of Beavers grew massively as there was less Elk to eat the Willow needed for Beavers to survive the winter. The Beaver dams also counter erosion and create new pond and marsh habitats for lots of other species.
nWaGY TIL that during the segregation in South Africa, there was a pencil test where on would be classified as non-white/non-European. One would put a pencil into their hair and shake their head, when it fell out, you were deemed white.
JY1Bj TIL as glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age, a catastrophic flood in the Pacific Northwest created a waterfall with an estimated flow ten times a great as that of all current rivers in the world combined.
Ao7B TIL- Of the Carlsberg Social Experiment, where a hidden camera observed the reactions of couples walking into a cinema with only 2 free seats remaining, and all the other 148 seats already filled by badass bikers.
dD4Qd TIL that masers (laser-like directed energy weapons using microwave radiation instead of visible light) actually predate lasers by several years, and in fact some of the earliest lasers were even referred to as "optical masers"