› added 5 years ago

107

TIL Roald Dahl wrote a Bond film.

Read more roalddahl.com

via reddit.com

bvv0 TIL that Queen Elizabeth II responds to the ring of a visitor’s cell phone by saying, “You’d better answer that. It might be someone important.”
YpEoP TIL the seeds of the Abrus precatorius plant contain the toxin abrin. Abrin is fatal at just 1/75 the dose of ricin. Abrin has an LD50 of 0.56 μg/kg in mice, and Kingsbury lists a toxic dose in humans at 0.00015% body weight, or approximately 0.1 mg for a 150 lb human. One chewed seed can be fatal.
8aWV TIL A mathematician called Paul Erdős used amphetamines to improve his work. A friend bet him $500 he couldn’t quit the amphetamines he for a month. Erdős won and then promptly resumed taking them after complaining it had delayed his mathematics work by a month.
W7DYA TIL before Ozzy Osbourne developed Parkinson's Disease, his entire genome was sequenced to help understand how he survived all the drugs and alcohol he consumed.
w1KM TIL during the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami on 26 December 2004, fishermen said they saw with their own eyes “the reality of generations of legends … the remains of ancient temples and hundreds of refrigerator-sized blocks, all briefly exposed before the sea swallowed them up again.”