› added 2 years ago

75

TIL The blocks in Tetris are called Tetrominoes

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

6E7mJ TIL that there is a fish that can cause hallucinations when eaten. The Ancient Romans consumed it as a drug, and its name in Arabic means "the fish that makes dreams". Its effects are thought to come from the fish's diet of phytoplankton.
KvWQ TIL in 2005, a student in England made a 1 million pixel webpage and put up the space for sale at $1 per pixel. He did this in order to pay for college and he was successful, selling out in less than 6 months.
wLV06 TIL: Viagra was discovered by accident. The drug (Sildenafil) was on trial as a blood pressure lowering medication but patients started reporting these raging boners as a side effect. However, they didn’t wanna return the samples and wanted to keep taking them you know, for science.
Bg4Wd TIL of a belly button bacteria study where 60 belly buttons got sampled and they discovered 2368 different species of bacteria; 1458 of these were new to science. One had a strange bacteria found in Japanese soil and they had never been to Japan. No bacteria was common to all buttons.
Orb7 TIL that the ancient Greeks used the term barbarian for anyone who didn’t speed Greek, including ancient Egyptians, as another language sounded like ‘bar bar bar’ to the Greeks which lead to the term 'barbarian’