› added 4 years ago

159

TIL our species is continuing to evolve in 3 ways: natural selection (by which many are adapting to malaria and high altitudes), random mutations (increasingly likely as more older males become fathers), and a mysterious genetic repair tool that biases eggs and sperm to C and G bases over A or T.

Read more theconversation.com

via reddit.com

bxa TIL 97% of girls in Egypt have had their clitoris cut off.
5VKaB TIL: The Allies raided a Nazi chemical company in 1944 and interrogated a chemist due to the amount of radioactive material involved. However, they learned that he was not working on nukes, but radioactive toothpaste known as Duramad, using radiation to kill germs. Some samples are in a museum now.
dj98 TIL Mac users prefer bigger fonts than Windows users, because Apple doesn’t use ClearType font rendering technique (patented by Microsoft) that improves the readability of smaller fonts
VBVN0 TIL that in the 1920s, the 'Little Albert Experiment' at Johns Hopkins University conditioned a nine-month-old infant to develop phobias of stimuli like Santa Claus and furry animals.
D1n5Y TIL Einstein married his first cousin, Elsa Löwenthal. (Not only were their mothers sisters, but their fathers were cousins too, making the married couple second cousins as well.) The relationship began while Einstein was still married to his first wife, physicist Mileva Marić.