› added 9 months ago

18

TIL roosters have a built-in volume limit to avoid deafening themselves when they crow

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b6Qy9 TIL actor Benedict Cumberbatch once stopped his Uber near Baker Street when he saw a cyclist being attacked by four men trying to steal his bike. He jumped out, physically pulled the assailants off the cyclist, and shouted at them until they fled. The cyclist was unharmed.
wLXQ1 TIL a critical mass of uranium assembled itself in what is now Gabon, forming the first and only natural nuclear reactor in history. It fissioned for hundreds of thousands of years before fizzling out.
v1xGB TIL that when future Czar Nicholas II visited Japan in 1891, he came back to Russia with a dragon tattoo and was nearly assassinated by a Japanese policeman who swung a sword at his face
R7L41 TIL George Miller, an M.D. at the time, was inspired to make Mad Max (1979) when he witnessed fights break out during a gas shortage in Australia. He assumed in the future nations would not implement infrastructure for renewable energy until it was too late and this could lead to a dystopia.
MrvB TIL in the 1980s a man with severe OCD shot himself in the head in an attempt to commit suicide. Instead of killing him, the bullet destroyed the part of his brain that was responsible for his OCD, and he went on to become a straight-A college student five years later.