› added 9 years ago

340

TIL that an estimated 10-20% of the entire population of Mauritania is enslaved. It only became a crime in 2007.

Read more edition.cnn.com

via reddit.com

yWm8 TIL that 10-20% of Americans and a higher percent of Europeans are infected with a brain parasite from cats that makes them 2.5 times more likely to get in a car accident, changes personality traits, contributes to schizophrenia, and may cause sexual attraction to cat urine.
W5xL TIL that some cat breeds (called “puppy cats”) are bred specifically to exhibit dog-like behavior.
OoXLY TIL Former baseball player Lenny Dykstra claimed he blackmailed umps to get better calls
dDKOK TIL Douglas Engelbart never received any royalties for the invention of the mouse. In an interview he said "SRI (Stanford Research Institute) patented the mouse, but they had no idea of its value. Some years later it was known that they had licensed it to Apple Computer for something like $40,000."
yQM0p TIL The word 'zombie' is never spoken in Romero's Night of the Living Dead. Romero himself didn't initially consider the antagonists in the film to be zombies, later saying "when I made the first film ... To me, zombies were still those boys in the Caribbean doing the wetwork for [Bela] Lugosi."