› added 7 years ago

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TIL the container ship Tokio Express lost nearly 5 million pieces of lego due to a massive wave in 1997. Coincidently, most pieces have an oceanic theme and continue to wash ashore to this day.

9VVG TIL that the very first time DNA fingerprinting evidence was used in a criminal case, its use cleared a teenage suspect of a murder he had confessed to under intense grilling.
7rgor TIL An elephant's penis is not only 6 feet long, but prehensile. A male elephant can use his penis to swat flies, scratch his belly, to balance like a third leg, and even to grasp onto things. It even does all the work during intercourse.
Me5GB TIL Prairie dog language is complex. They don’t just have a call for “danger”: their calls differentiate human, hawk, domesticated dog, coyote etc. and specify size & color. One study found that they can communicate “Here comes the short human in the yellow” (vs the tall human in blue) to each other
GYwZJ TIL that "mile" derives from Latin "miles passus", meaning "thousand paces". In the same way, "kilo" derives from Greek and also means thousand. Thus, depending on which language you say "thousand" in, you are talking about either weight or distance.
4XWba TIL of Amsterdam Time, UTC +00:20 and used from 1909 until the Nazis invaded in 1940. That made the Netherlands 20 minutes ahead of London. The reason for this offset was that it was centered on the mean solar time of the tower of the Westerkerk Church in Amsterdam and not on Greenwich Mean Time.