› added 3 months ago

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TIL sci fi author Jack Williamson coined the terms terraforming (1942), psionics (1952), and was one of the first people to use the term genetic engineering.

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0dXw5 TIL: Humans and bananas share about 40 to 60 percent of the same DNA
P1xLw TIL The first reference to a space station in fiction was in 1869 and it was made from bricks.
ngOP TIL that in 1969 Mick Jagger wrote to artist M.C. Escher asking him to provide an image for a Rolling Stones album cover. Escher turned him down. He’d never heard of the Stones. He’d never heard of Jagger and he objected to Jagger addressing him by his first name.
0wgxA TIL Elephants "may show lateral preference when grasping with their trunks: some prefer to twist them to the left, others to the right." Essentially, they can be left or right "trunked"!
4YM5 TIL of a Malawian teenager who taught himself how to build a windmill out of junk and bring power to his village. He then went on to build a second, larger windmill to power irrigation pumps. He did this all from books he read in the library.