› added 1 year ago

385

TIL that ants are descended from a flightless ancestor of wasps

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8epaG TIL "Cute aggression" or the urge to squeeze cute animals or babies is the brain’s coping mechanism to temper the onslaught of positive feelings. Because if you find yourself incapacitated by how cute a baby is—so much so that you simply can't take care of it—that baby is going to starve.
8eNNL TIL If you were to unravel all the DNA molecules in your body and lay them end to end, they would stretch from the Earth to the Sun and back over 600 times.
4XNQN TIL flotsam, jetsam, lagan & derelict all have very specific legal meanings under the law of the admiralty and marine salvage
Jggm TIL Ronald Reagan once joked on a un-aired NPR broadcast that the US had declared war on Russia, the broadcast was later leaked and caused a portion of the Soviet Army to go on alert for 30 minutes.
R7NP4 TIL There are a billion missing years in earth's rock layers -- one theory is that Snowball Earth, where miles of ice eroded those rock layers and sent the sediment into the oceans where they were plunged back into the mantle to be recycled -- there are also no fossil layers before this period