› added 5 years ago

126

TIL about Marie Pantalon. A French woman in 1850 that decided to become a Gold Digger. She pretended to be a man to get to California, worked like any man, wielded a gun to defend her claims, and dressed in pants, unthinkable at the time, eventually obtained official permission to wear the pants.

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gdv4 TIL bacteriophage therapy, discarded by western medicine, has been practiced for years in the Former Soviet Union, and has great potential in treating in diseases where antibiotics are failing.
b6ZAj TIL Idaho is the only state that expressly bans cannibalism.
6EkvZ TIL London Taxi drivers have to memorize ~25,000 streets (called "the Knowledge") in order to get licensed. A 2000 study found that they have larger hippocampi, a part of the brain associated with learning and memory.
lob0V TIL that Shakespeare's epitaph contains a curse for grave robbers.
wLBa6 TIL eight percent of our DNA consists of remnants of ancient viruss, and another 40 percent is made up of repetitive strings of genetic letters that is also thought to have that origin.