› added 7 years ago

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TIL the terms Top dog and Under dog are thought to originate from saw pits used in shipbuilding. Wood to be cut was placed on planks called “dogs”. The sawyer standing on top was in charge hence ‘top dog’ while the sawyer working in the pit would get covered in sawdust hence 'underdog’.

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vPP97 TIL facial movements commonly thought to signal particular emotions regardless of context, person, and culture are not universally diagnostic of emotional states
p7G8 TIL that two zebras died of hunger in a zoo in Palestine and were replaced with donkeys painted with black and white stripes.
k75g TIL that in 1950 ‘One of the largest human experiments in history’ was conducted on unsuspecting residents of San Francisco by the US military in a germ-warfare simulation and Nuremberg Code violation that utilized the Bay Area’s iconic fog to help spread two kinds of bacteria over the city.
BgNYr TIL Iceland is still trying to reforest land from when the Vikings conquered the country over 1000 years ago.
ZpZpR TIL there is a super massive black hole named TON 618 which is 140 trillion times more luminous and 66 billion times more massive than the Sun. This is more mass than the entire Milky Way galaxy.