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TIL chickens are great at reducing the tick population in a given area. Scientists estimate that a single chicken can eat 22113 ticks in a single season

Read more ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

via reddit.com

R7BEw TIL about Philipp Mainländer a philosopher who theorised that God committed suicide and his decaying corpse is the living universe, and since God was an infinite being the only way he could kill himself was to shatter his timeless being into a time-bound and material universe.
kOPLm TIL: The Library of Alexandria, one of the largest ancient stores of knowledge, burned down, losing anywhere between 40k - 400k scrolls. It is said that even today, scholars still mourn its loss as one of the largest known scholarly losses of all time.
e0bd6 TIL: Nuclear bombers sometimes were painted with "ANTI-FLASH WHITE" (also called blast white or atomic white) to deflect some thermal radiation from their bombs' nuclear explosions. (Shiny silvery surfaces can have similar effect.)
1gEr TIL there is a cola named OpenCola witch is open source. The instructions for making it are freely available and modifiable. Anybody can make the drink, and anyone can modify and improve on the recipe as long as they, too, license their recipe under the GNU General Public License.
QJ81E TIL that the entomologist Justin O. Schmidt created the ''Schmidt sting pain index''. This scale rates the pain from stings of ants, wasps and bees. While getting stung by a warrior wasp, he told to himself: ''Torture. You are chained in the flow of an active volcano. Why did I start this list?''.