› added 7 years ago

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TIL that when Tom Green won a Golden Rasberry Award for "Freddy Got Fingered", he showed up in a white cadillac, rolled out his own red carpet, told the crowd he wanted to win the award, then pulled out and played a harmonica until security dragged him offstage.

oR7Oo TIL DNA transfer does not only occur "vertically", that is, from parent to progeny. There is also a form of DNA transfer known as horizontal or intracellular DNA transfer, which consists in a piece of DNA being transferred from the genome of one cell to that of another—including between species.
EgemV TIL Robert Taylor popularized hand soap from a pump when his company introduced Softsoap in 1978. To forestall competition from larger companies, he ordered 100 million pumps from the only existing US manufacturers. The $12 million buy prevented the giants from matching his product for over a year.
xAQD TIL that Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus posited early theories of evolution, wrote a book illustrated by poet William Blake, invented a steering mechanism later used in automobiles, opposed slavery and advocated formal education for girls.
kOrp5 TIL Stirling Colgate, heir to the Colgate toothpaste family fortune, was a physicist who proposed the use of satellites for detection of nuclear weapons testing. He went on to conduct research that helped Chandrasekhar win a Nobel Prize after realizing that the satellites were detecting supernovae.
wLkJ8 TIL Japan's criminal justice system has a conviction rate of over 99%. To Japanese citizens and police, the arrest itself already creates the presumption of guilt which needs only to be verified via a confession.