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TIL the iPad was in development long before the iPhone, despite officially releasing 3 years after the iPhone.

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mxZDp TIL that before the new world was colonized, "corn" could refer to any edible plant-seed including millet, barley, rye, wheat, maize, or oats. English settlers had no word for maize, so they called it "Indian corn," and eventually just corn.
xL17 TIL most languages name the game of Chess after their word for “check”
E1xmP TIL most Koreans don't produce body odor due to large scale dominance of the gene ABCC11. As a consequence, deodorant is a rare commodity.
d8LL7 TIL Lego Mindstorms was named after Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, a book arguing the benefits of teaching computer literacy in primary and secondary education written by Seymour Papert, an AI pioneer and the co-creator of Turtle graphics and the LOGO programming language
MEoW TIL severing the limb of a Bloodwood tree triggers the same type of response you’d see if you severed a human limb. The damage causes the release of a deep crimson sap that looks alarmingly like human blood; its sole purpose is to coagulate and seal wounds, but has many other medical uses as well.