› added 1 month ago

3

TIL: "Felo de se" was a legal term in early English common law where suicide was considered a felony—resulting in shameful crossroad burials (often with a stake through the heart) and forfeiture of property, punishable until abolished in 1961

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

e0exL TIL that owls have serrations on the edge of their flight feathers, allowing an owl's flight to be practically silent. Some fish-eating owls, for which silence has no evolutionary advantage, lack this adaptation.
4Q9N TIL Stalin’s hated his oldest son,Yakov, so much that when he tried and failed to commit suicide by gun Stalin joked “He can’t even shoot straight.” Yakov later died in a German concentration camp, possibly after disobeying a guard. Stalin felt this was an honorable death.
QJLE9 TIL that the Higgs Boson's media nickname "The God Particle" came from physicist Leon Lederman. He wrote a book and wanted it titled "The Goddamn Particle", poking fun at how hard it was to find. The publishers changed the title to "The God Particle" and the nickname stuck.
P1eAw TIL that the Beach Boys' song "Never Learn Not to Love" started as a demo written for the band by Charles Manson titled "Cease To Exist". Manson was not credited as a songwriter due to the fact that he "exchanged his official writing credit for a sum of cash and a motorcycle".
E1g7V TIL that a 2012 survey of 1,000 Americans found that 45% of them wished they could skip Christmas due to financial pressures