› added 8 months ago

29

TIL that before President Carter’s death, it had been 51 years since the last passing of a US Democratic president.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

arjb TIL Mao Zedong ordered the people of China to kill sparrows because they steal grain. Since sparrows also eat insects, their absence caused a locust epidemic that ravaged crops and killed millions of people.
e0mwk TIL A Japanese cat burglar was unmasked as a 74-year-old pensioner after 9 years’ worth of heists. Mitsuaki Tanigawa stole more than 29 million yen (£194,000) during his spree. When captured, he said: "I am defeated."
xVMyg TIL that the male fig wasp mate with the females inside the fig, and before dieing inside the fruit, they chew a hole for the females to escape from the fig interior.
VajQ TIL the productivity of the team behind Powerpuff girls dropped significantly due to the release of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The few who didn’t play the game felt left out and annyoed as the rest wouldn’t stop talking about it.
a8GML TIL with a radius between 640 and 764 times that of the Sun, the surface of the red supergiant star Betelgeuse (the tenth-brightest star in the night), if it were at the centre of our Solar System, would lie beyond the asteroid belt and it would engulf the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars.