› added 9 years ago

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TIL the emerald jewel wasp can remove a cockroach’s fight or flight response. This renders the cockroach docile, enabling the wasp to lead it around like a dog.

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oRR1E TIL Brian O'Leary wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the physical properties of the Martian surface and was selected as a scientist-astronaut by NASA in 1967 for a potential manned Mars mission when it was still in NASA's program plan
4wYo TIL Greenland got its name because the Viking who discovered it was banished from Iceland and felt lonely in his new homeland, so he named and advertised it as the lush ‘Greenland’ to attract settlers, despite the fact that it was actually a completely barren and largely uninhabitable land
JYovQ TIL that the name "quark" for subatomic particles was inspired by the book Finnegans Wake. Physicist Murray Gell-Mann coined the term after seeing the following passage in the book: ‘Three quarks for Muster Mark!’.
VBBD8 TIL the price of carbon fiber for aircraft construction dropped due to innovations driven by the B-2 program in the 1980s and Boeing 777 work in the 1990s
69MKY TIL ALL centipedes are venomous. They inject venom through appendages which are actually modified legs instead of fangs. The number of pairs of legs is an odd number that ranges from 15 pairs to 191 pairs.