› added 1 year ago

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TIL that when the Arctic ground squirrel hibernates it's body temperature can reach -2.9 degrees. It can prevent it's blood from freezing by cleansing it's body of ice nucleators which enable the development of ice crystals. This is being studied to help preserve human organs for transplant.

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JV1Q TIL cigarette filters are printed to look like cork.
R5ZD6 TIL Joseph Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' was published to little fanfare and was nearly forgotten. However by the 1960s it had had been analysed more than any other work of literature that is studied in universities. It would serve as the basis for the movie 'Apocalypse Now', revered as a classic
m1Y5v TIL black widow spiders are not aggressive — you often have to actually pinch or squeeze one to get it to attack — but their venom makes bites extremely painful to humans, and to small animals like mice, fatal.
9wbpp TIL that the Chinese military is known as the People's Liberation Army, the Chinese navy is known as the People's Liberation Army Navy, and the Chinese marine corps is known as the People's Liberation Army Navy Marine Corps
jN5Dp TIL the earliest recorded use of LOL as an initialism was for "little old lady" in the 1960s. During the Apollo mission, ferrite cores were used as transformers and acted as either a binary one or zero. The LOLs created the required software by weaving together sequences of one and zero cores.