› added 8 years ago

108

TIL in 1959, a group attempting to find the path used by Hannibal’s army to cross the Alps and invade Roman Italy successfully traversed the Alps from France to Italy with an 11yr old former circus elephant named Jumbo.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

OJv7 TIL charcoal beetles fly into still-burning forest fires to mate and lay eggs because competition and predators will be low. They sense distant fires using infrared armpit sensors.
mxdo TIL that female protesters in Egypt were subjected to virginity tests after being arrested. In 2012.
b6WkN TIL that the inventors of INSULIN sold the patent in 1923 to the University of Toronto for a mere $1 saying they felt it was unethical for a doctor to profit from a discovery that would save lives. Two of the inventors won the Nobel Prize in 1923 and split the money with the two others not included
oBWjL TIL Way back in 1994 a camera was trained upon a lonely fishtank within the as yet unknown company Netscape. It transmitted live images of the fishtank to the emerging new landscape known as the World Wide Web. It was the second live camera on the web and is the oldest camera site still in existence
KKr6 TIL heterosexual prostitution is illegal in Japan, but homosexual prostitution is not. This is because homosexual relations are not “true” sexual conduct, but only “imitation.”