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TIL: In Medieval Germany, peasants believed in a magical land called “Cockaigne”, or “schlaraffenland”, where you could grab pork sausage off of trees or have cooked fish swim out of a beer river and onto your plate. This tale stuck and motivated the working class; in fact, it’s still told today!

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MEj7 TIL The actress who played Laurie on that 70’s show died in her sleep at a rehab facility from “multiple drug intoxication” in 2013
d8Omr TIL Abraham Lincoln's family line is believed to have gone extinct in 1985 after the death of his last great-grandson. While other relatives exist, no direct descendants of the former president are alive today.
MPpm TIL that soldiers use Silly String in Iraq for bomb detection. It travels far enough where a soldier can shoot it across most rooms, and it’s light enough such that if some Silly String lands on the tripwire, it won’t cause the bomb to explode.
6E96X You’re in luck. For their senior project, two Cornell University computer-engineering whizzes recently built a machine that does just that. After learning in class how breathalyzers work, Robert Clain and Miguel Salas assembled a fart detector from a sensitive hydrogen sulfide monitor, a thermometer and a microphone and wrote the software that would rate the emission. A “slight perturbance in the air” near the detector sets it to work measuring the three pillars of fart quality: stench, temperature and sound. Temperature, Clain explains, is critical.
16aer TIL 35 to 45% of cases of Borderline Personality Disorder are influenced by genetics.