› added 11 years ago

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TIL The CIA spent $15 million and 5 years developing a robotic kitty that they could use to spy on the Soviets. A few minutes after being released, the kitty was run over by a cab.

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R7Ng9 TIL The Inuit people of northern Greenland had many metal knives and tools despite having no mines or smelting: they used enormous iron meteorites for their metal which American explorer Robert E. Peary ultimately stole.
p8j5O TIL that the oldest dingo fossils in Australia are about 4,000 years old, so dingoes’ ancestors must have reached Australia by boat. Whole-genome studies consistently place dingoes between wolves and wolflike dog breeds.
yQR5l TIL: Ringworm is a skin infection caused by a fungus, not a worm. The same fungi can be responsible for tinea, jock itch & infections of the scalp and nails.
0wdAR Possibly. The trees-down (or “arboreal”) hypothesis has been around for many years, says evolutionary biologist Richard O. Prum of Yale University. Researchers guessed that the scales of tree-dwelling Triassic reptiles elongated into feathers, which helped them leap away from predators. Once the proto-birds could glide, they were en route to avian flight. “It was like one big, crazy hairball of ideas all stuck together,” Prum says.
5Yrn8 TIL Germans have nothing to do with German chocolate cake. It was made by an American whose last name was "German".