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TIL there is a butter flavoring that used to be used in microwavable popcorn that causes “popcorn lung,” a dangerous and potentially fatal lung disease. Major popcorn companies only just began disusing the chemical in 2007.

Read more boston.com

via reddit.com

mB7p TIL in order to convince CBS to allow Lucille Ball to be shown pregnant on “I Love Lucy,” Desi Arnaz consulted a priest, a rabbi and a minister, all of whom said it was fine. CBS relented, but still prohibited “pregnant” words, so Arnaz pronounced “expecting” as “spectin” in his Cuban accent.
xVPJB TIL that there is a part of Mount Everest known as the Rainbow Valley. It is named not because there are rainbows there, but because of the brightly-colored jackets on the frozen corpses that litter the valley.
D1bvg TIL in 2016 Scientists observed the first case of a giant spider eating an opossum: Scientists from the University of Michigan were studying predation of small vertebrates by arthropods in the Peruvian Amazon when they came across a giant tarantula devouring an opossum, which was still twitching
aDv9 TIL… When Alan Shepard was waiting for liftoff to become the first man in space, a reporter asked him what he was thinking about. He replied “The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder.”
8a6LV TIL that some spiders create beautiful patterns in their webs of spirals, disc shapes or vertical lines; although there are several theories it’s not certain why they do it.