› added 8 years ago

267

TIL Most all road signs in the US are made by prison inmates

Read more marketplace.org

via ift.tt

J16rm TIL the Death Camas plant is so toxic that there is only one known pollinator. The plant is visited by a specialist mining bee, which can tolerate its toxins - others are fatally poisoned. One plant species name is Toxicoscordion venenosum var. venenosum ≈ toxic bulb poisonous poisonous.
p8X6O TIL for millennia, people slept in two shifts – once in the evening, and once in the morning. Biphasic sleeping is mentioned as early as the 8th Century BC, and appears to have remained the dominant, natural format up until the Industrial Revolution.
oXGE TIL of Whataboutism, a propaganda tactic used in the Soviet Union to discredit critics. When a criticism was posed, they would respond with “What about ____”, followed by a bad event from the west in the past.
kOnbe TIL Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson was the first African American woman to earn a doctorate from MIT, and the second in the US to earn a doctorate in physics. She was also made an International Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2012 and awarded the National Medal of Science in 2014.
j6Kna TIL that The first animals to orbit the moon were two Russian tortoises inside Zond 5 spacecraft, The tortoises not only survived the journey, but returned to the Earth alive . On 21 September 1968, six days after the launch, Zond 5 was retrieved from the Indian Ocean.