› added 1 year ago

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TIL: That fungi have a range of vital roles from helping plants draw water + nutrients from soil to medicines that can lower blood cholesterol or enable organ transplants. But they have a darker side: devastating trees, crops, other plants across the world and wiping out animals such as amphibians.

Read more bbc.co.uk

via reddit.com

wDWW TIL that grunting in tennis is punishable by losing a point to the opponent. This is because some player’s grunts, like Maria Sharapova’s, whose grunt is nearly equal to that of a lion’s roar, can affect how the opponent returns the ball.
kORW5 TIL Peter the Great's godson, Abraham Petrovich Gannibal, was an African born, freed slave who was a military and civil engineering genius, who not only fought successfully for the Russian Empire but also for the Kingdom of France.
p87ye TIL by 400 BC, Persian engineers had mastered the technique of storing ice in the middle of summer in the desert.
LQXxZ TIL artificial grape flavor can be made from coal byproducts
adaZ TIL that the speeding up mechanism in Space Invaders was actually unintentional - the processor was just ‘more efficient when there were fewer objects on screen’