› added 13 years ago

150

TIL Most black Jamaicans have Irish ancestry, due to the Irish slave population mixing with West African slaves

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jLZM TIL - In athletics if you move as the gun sounds, you have considered to have false started - as the human brain cannot hear and process the noise of the starting gun in under 0.10 seconds
78EjP TIL of Burushaski - a language isolate predominantly from Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan. It has 4 genders - human masculine, human feminine, countable objects, and uncountable ones (similar to mass nouns)
j5oQ TIL that abstract paintings by a previously unknown artist “Pierre Brassau” were exhibited at a gallery in Sweden, earning praise for his “powerful brushstrokes” and the “delicacy of a ballet dancer”. None knew that Pierre Brassau was actually a 4 year old chimp from the local zoo.
6EOWQ TIL that locusts are mutated grasshoppers. When an abundance of food is followed by a drought they are forced to group, causing the insect to mutate in a matter of hours from green to brown, solitary to swarming, and become long distance flyers. Up until 1920 they were considered 2 different species
J1RZ8 TIL the longest theoretical sight line at ground level on earth is Hindu-tagh in China to Mt. Dankova in Kyrgyzstan at 538 Km, while the longest photographed sight line is from the Spanish Pyrenees to French Alps at 443 Km.