› added 4 years ago

206

TIL that Nobel laureate Stanley Prusiner who discovered prions, an infectious protein in the brain, was attacked by both the scientific establishment and the media when he presented his ideas due to the thinking that an infectious protein would be impossible.

gM8r9 TIL that Lebron James rejected a $10 million offer from Reebok when he was just 18. When asked why, he said that Nike or Adidas might offer him a bit more. Less than a year later, he accepted a $90 million offer from Nike.
kJLv7 TIL the scent of Play-doh has been trademarked. Hasbro describes it as “sweet, slightly musky, vanilla fragrance, with slight overtones of cherry, combined with the smell of a salted, wheat-based dough.”
ZpVg4 TIL about Whipping Tom of 1681, a nickname given to a serial spanker in London. He would wait for an unaccompanied woman, grab her, lift her dress and slap her buttocks whiles shouting "Spanko!" before fleeing. Vigilantes would dress in women's clothing and patrol the areas he was known to operate.
4X94w TIL of the Korean TV programme, 'Finding Dispersed Families', that aired in 1983 and was responsible for reuniting over 10,000 Koreans with family that they had lost during the Korean War. Originally planned to be 95 minutes, the programme went on to run for 453 hours, with over 53,000 participants.
R74N9 TIL about Maroons, enslaved Africans who quickly escaped in the countries they were brought to and often joined indigenous populations to form warrior tribes with their own complex language, war and living cultures. Many Maroon warfare tactics have been co-opted into global army training today.