› added 7 years ago

355

TIL in Maori myth Maui tried to make man immortal by turning into a worm and entering the vagina of the goddess of death while she slept, to reverse the path of birth. A bird laughed at this and woke the goddess, who crushed Maui with her vagina’s obsidian teeth, making Maui the first man to die.

Read more wikipedia.org

via ift.tt

VD9p TIL Until 1735 no new metals had been discovered since prehistoric times; iron, copper, silver, gold, zinc, mercury, tin, lead & bismuth. When Georg Brandt recognised a tenth, Cobalt, he became the first ever known person to discover a metal. For thousands of years cobalt was mistaken for bismuth.
KYdrE TIL Mexico is the top consumer of eggs in the world surpassing Japan, with 409 eggs per person in 2021.
E1AJx TIL Hepatitis C is the most common cause of cirrhosis and liver cancer. From it's discovery in 1989, it took less than 25 years to identify, model and create an oral treatment that can completely cure a person in 8-12 weeks. 1-2% of the world population has HepC. Most don't even know it.
8eRjK TIL that during the Pony Express' 18 months of operation, it covered a distance equivalent to circling the Earth 30 times to deliver a total of 34,753 letters, and only lost one bag of mail.
yQGbJ TIL that General Motors chemist Thomas Midgley Jr. invented both chlorofluorocarbons and leaded gasoline, having "more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history."