› added 7 years ago

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TIL Magpies are considered one of the most intelligent animals in the world, and the only non-mammal species able to recognize itself in a mirror test.

VrR0 TIL when Einstein was told of the publication of a book entitled, ‘100 Authors Against Einstein’, he replied: “Why one hundred? If I were wrong, one would have been enough.”
VMD9Q TIL that polka dots are called that simply because the polka was a fashionable dance around the time the pattern became popular, and there's no other reason.
WkMko TIL Charles Darwin & his wife were first cousins. They had 10 kids, 7 making it to adulthood. Worried that his marriage had something to do with the deaths, he began to experiment with plants. He learned that with any kind of breeding, it's better to cross-breed than to keep relatives together.
xVVGk Of all the bodies in our solar system, the sun is probably the one we want to give the widest berth. It gushes radiation, and even though its surface is the coolest part of the star, it burns at about 9,940°F, hot enough to incinerate just about any material. As such, there are no plans to send a manned mission in its direction anytime soon (Mars is much more interesting, anyway), but it can't hurt to figure out at what distance a person would want to turn back. You can get surprisingly close. The sun is about 93 million miles away from Earth, and if we think of that distance as a football field, a person starting at one end zone could get about 95 yards before burning up.
nWJVb TIL that during WWII, the British government implemented Operation Pied Piper, evacuating over 3 million children from cities to rural areas to protect them from bombings. These "evacuees" were sent away from their families, impacting communities but ensuring their safety.