› added 12 years ago

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TIL every year in the mekong river in Thailand, hundreds of fireballs erupt from the surface of the water, and nobody knows what causes them. locals believe a mythical serpent called Naga spits fire from the water. The event is known as Naga fireballs.

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4XawJ TIL: Religious people are much more likely to give to secular causes than non-religious. Less than half of Americans who “never” attend religious services give any money at all. People who attend services 27-52 times per year give money to secular charities in two thirds of cases.
Yp9rv TIL of U.S. Patent 3216423: Apparatus for facilitating the birth of a child by centrifugal force, which was intended to facilitate labour by spinning a pregnant mother. The designers believed that "civilised women... often do not have the opportunity to develop the muscles needed in confinement."
EgyJW TIL Tetris is called Tetris because of the Greek prefix “tetra” which means four, which is how many blocks are in a Tetris piece.
bnN4 TIL that in the 60s, the US military secretly sprayed (possibly radioactive) experimental chemicals, like zinc cadmium, on thousands of residents of poor neighborhoods in St. Louis, without their knowledge or consent, to see what would happen
yVoml TIL that when writing in the Hanunó'o script, used for an indigenous language in the Philippines, right-handed and left-handed people often write texts that are mirror images of each other, both in letter orientation and writing direction.