› added 8 years ago

127

TIL that DeForest Kelley disliked repeating Dr. McCoy’s catchphrase “He’s dead, Jim”, which appears 20 times in the original Star Trek series. It became so famous, however, that he joked that the line would appear on his tombstone. It did appear in the first sentence of Kelley’s obituary.

41Wa TIL according to a Chinese legend, music was invented in 2697 B.C., when the Emperor Huang Ti send Ling Lun to cut bamboo poles that would produce a sound matching the call of a phoenix bird.
ADMyB TIL that a team in Tanzania is training giant rats to spot Tuberculosis in human spit. The rats can test 100 samples in 10 to 20 minutes: a human with a microscope takes 4 days to test the same number. The same species is also used to detect landmines.
R5R86 TIL of Alyoshenka, a prematurely born female baby so highly deformed that the fetus is believed to be of extraterrestrial origin (or from fall-out from the 1957 Kyshtym Disaster). The body was given up for DNA testing and went missing (photos and video remains).
4rXR TIL there is a tree named Pando that is technically an entire forest. It is a clonal colony of 4700 aspens’s that all share the same root system.
XEXy8 TIL The Personal Computer Memory Card International Association (PCMCIA) was a group of computer hardware manufacturers, from 1989 to 2009/2010. This acronym was difficult to say and remember, and was sometimes jokingly referred to as "People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms"