› added 1 month ago

9

TIL that “rock, paper, scissors” is a 2,000-year old game that originated in China. It made its way to Japan, where it was spread worldwide in the early 1900s. Past names included “frog, slug, snake” and “fox, village head, hunter.”

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

rN1n1 TIL on our billions years old planet, trees have only been around for 400M years. For the first 40M bacteria, fungus, mold, yeast, and animals had NFI what to do with them. So trees just got old and fell over. 40M years of perfectly fine baseball bats and chesterfields just laying around the place.
rDod TIL in Titanic, Jack and Rose could both have survived if Rose took off her lifejacket and put it under the plank. It wasn’t a question of room, but buoyancy, and the lifejacket would have given the needed buoyancy for them both to survive. Some ingenuity would have saved them.
5Y7er TIL Bee's deposit a small positive electric charge on each flower they visit. They also posses "Electroreception" which allows them to detect the presence of electric fields on flowers. They use this info to know if a flower has been recently visited by another bee and therefore has less nectar.
WOdA TIL that before the Civil War, some psychiatrists diagnosed slaves with what they called drapetomania: “a mental illness in which the slave possessed an irrational desire for freedom and a tendency to try to escape.”
yM9v TIL Benjamin Franklin designed one of the first U.S. coins and instead of “In God We Trust” it said “Mind Your Business”