› added 7 years ago

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TIL Al-Jazari, a 12th-century Kurdish polymath, invented the crankshaft, piston engine, valve, cam, mechanical clock, combination lock, hydropower driven water supply system, and the first programmable humanoid robot. Leonardo Da Vinci was inspired by his work.

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dDr7Q TIL ant corpses release a chemical when they die. A scientist once recreated this chemical and put it on a live ant. Its ant friends kept bringing it to the graveyard no matter how much it struggled to return.
p85MZ TIL the Implicit Assumption Test (IAT) can help you identify your ingrained biases you didn't know existed.
XEOZ6 TIL the sun loses about 6 million tons of mass every second due to nuclear fusion and the solar wind. Despite losing that much material, it has only lost about 0.05% of it's original mass over the past 4.5 billion years.
78WVX TIL Schizophrenics Can Tickle Themselves
lobr TIL the swedish former physical education teacher Richard Juhlin has the best nose for wine (champagne specifically) and in a now infamous blind tasting in 2003, arranged by Spectacle du Monde, he correctly identified 43 of 50 wines. The one who came in second correctly identified four.