› added 1 week ago

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TIL that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World, may not have existed. The only sources referencing it come from later Greeks and Romans. Herodotus, the Greek historian who would've lived closest to its construction, makes no mention of it in his work on Babylon.

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4vkw TIL Psilocybe tampanensis, a psychedelic mushroom species, was found once and never again in Tampa, Florida in 1977, and all of today’s widely circulating tampanensis mushrooms are the descendants of that original specimen.
16eRV TIL sun exposure may cause skin cancer, but it also lowers overall mortality rates, including from cancer
dNgK TIL the producers of The Simpsons considered aborting the series if the second episode’s animation turned out as bad as the first, which was so appalling that after seeing it for the first time, they had to redo 70% of before it could go to air.
NXyWQ TIL harbor porpoises hunt small fish (3-10 cm) almost continuously day and night to meet their energy needs, catching up to 550 per hour with a prey capture success rate of over 90%.
LQOn0 TIL that Mark DeFriest, known as the Houdini of Florida, is a prisoner in the Florida State Prison. His original four-year sentence has since developed into 34 years for 13 escape attempts, 7 of them successful, and hundreds of disciplinary reports.