› added 4 years ago

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TIL Spaceman Spiff from Calvin and Hobbes was written as a parody of the space opera genre, spoofing Flash Gordon and Star Wars.

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o18W TIL that chimps in the wild will occasionally steal human infants and eat them.
9Brm TIL that Greek Fire, fire that was almost impossible to put out and generally used to attack ships, was created in the 7th century but its recipe has been lost to history and we still aren’t completely sure what it was made of.
W77lN TIL slime molds are problem solvers, scooting around on pseudopods before ballooning to release their spores. They can find the shortest path through a maze, and they inspired a slime-mold algorithm that researchers used to map filaments of dark matter connecting galaxies in the universe.
Vj8Q TIL while filming The Blues Brothers, Dan Aykroyd saved Carrie Fisher by performing the Heimlich maneuver while she was choking on a Brussels sprout.
ADYnB TIL that in 2006, the US department of defense paid $997.798 for two nineteen cent washers