› added 11 years ago

178

TIL that cats are unable to taste sweet flavors, and are the only mammal that cannot do so.

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Owb4 TIL The United States of America has existed for longer than the (original) Persian Empire did
6E7kY TIL Henry Ford bought an area of Brazilian rainforest the size of Connecticut to build 'Fordlandia', the greatest rubber plantation known to man, where alcohol, women and football were banned. It produced almost no rubber, immediately descended into rioting and disease, and was abandoned
e0Zm6 TIL that hundreds or thousands of mites - microscopic tiny eight-legged animals - are living in the pores. They are related to spiders or ticks, spend most of their lives in our pores, and while we sleep, they crawl out onto the skin's surface to mate and then head back to lay their eggs.
PYK9J TIL about Hemigrapsus estellinensis, an extinct species of crab that lived solely in a small saltwater spring in the Texas panhandle, 500 miles from the ocean. Probably a relic of the Pleistocene Era, the species was wiped out when the U.S. Army built a dike around the spring in 1964.
0dZ1A TIL that emergency and civil defense sirens are called such because an early model could make sound underwater, like the seaborn sirens of Greek mythology