› added 1 year ago

76

TIL that the Micronesian island of Yap uses giant boulders as a form of currency.

Read more bbc.com

via reddit.com

QNVxM TIL Charles Darwin only worked about 4 hours a day. He worked for two 90-minute periods each morning & then one 60-minute period later in the day. Before the latter, he would take an hour nap & go on 2 walks. On this schedule he wrote 19 books including The Descent of Man & On the Origin of Species.
rNOj0 TIL The feeling of falling while you're asleep happens because your muscles become very relaxed and enter into temporary paralysis. The brain misinterprets this as falling and sends signals to your muscles to jerk upright which leads you to startle awake.
ZKWa TIL that Wikipedia had to ban IP’s from Congress to stop them from changing each other’s entries.
rNVLd TIL that PET scans work based on antimatter. The patient is injected with a radioactive material that generates positrons, which annihilate with electrons in the patient’s body. The PET scanner detects the gamma radiation that’s generated.
yQXBp TIL that Until 2013, 10% of US electricity came from disassembled Russian nuclear warheads