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TIL W. E. B. Du Bois envisioned "an Encyclopedia Africana," named like the Encyclopædia Britannica. Du Bois envisioned a scientific and comprehensive work on Africa and Africans that would refute the Enlightenment notion of blacks as devoid of civilization. Due to lack of support, the project died

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KODp9 TIL That a rat king is a collection of rats who’s tails have been intertwined and bound together. They grow together and eat together and sometimes when one of them dies they eat it together. There can be up to 32 rats in one rat king.
0jxN TIL that we don’t see pure black when we close our eyes, we see a color named Eigengrau and although there are a few theories as to what causes it nobody’s quite sure.
nBYY TIL Paranormal Activity was made for just $15,000, but went on to make $190 million. At its test screening, people walked out. Dreamworks thought it was because the movie was terrible—it turned out that people were just terrified.
moVo TIL that a complaint among test audiences for the film Good Night, and Good Luck, was that the actor playing Joseph McCarthy was too over the top and wasn’t believable, not realizing that the film used actual archive footage of McCarthy himself.
j6Lnp TIL Aristotle hypothesized that nature contains no vacuums because the denser surrounding material continuum would immediately fill the rarity of an incipient void. The hypothesis was termed horror vacui (Latin: horror of the vacuum) or plenism— commonly stated as "nature abhors a vacuum".