› added 12 years ago

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TIL there is a parasite that can only reproduce inside the stomach of cats. When it’s excreted in feces and eaten by a rat, the parasite rewires the rat’s brain to be attracted to cats. This same effect can occur in humans and is thought to be a reason behind the stereotypical crazy cat person.

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Emad TIL that when Huckleberry Finn was first published, it was banned not for being racist as it is many times today, but for NOT being racist. It showed the friendship between a black man and a white boy.
D1L9e TIL that some psychedelics, including LSD and psilocybin, promote measurable neuroplastic and neurogenic growth in several different ways, and that there is established research on it.
oBDbr TIL world demographics are about to drastically shift in the next 80 years, resulting is a reshuffle of the world power order.
gMY78 TIL in the northeast Indian state of Manipur, separatist movements have banned mainstream Indian culture like Bollywood. This has led many youth to take to K-pop instead, largely through pirated copies smuggled from Myanmar. Korean phrases are also becoming increasingly common in the local dialect.
wMw6 TIL photographer Mathew Brady captured over 7000 photos of the US Civil War (including the portrait of Lincoln that would be used for the $5 bill), which have become the most important visual documentation of the period. He died in debt after the US gov’t did not buy his master-copies after the war.