› added 6 years ago

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TIL that the melody to the medieval English folk song "Nottamun Town" was considered lost to history until musicologists found isolated, illiterate, populations in Appalachia singing the song with a common melody and lyrics.

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yQjAM TIL that there have been several cases of whale carcasses bursting due to a buildup of gas in the decomposition process. In Nov 1970, when a dead whale was about to burst, a team blew it up using dynamite in an attempt to dispose of it. The explosion threw whale flesh over 800 feet (240 M) away!
p8WQG TIL about the Rosenhan experiment where fake patients feigned hallucinations to enter psychiatric hospitals were diagnosed with schizophrenia and continued to be treated even after they started acting normally proving that it's nearly impossible to distinguish sane from insane in a psych ward.
Z8oWG TIL The Great Wall of China is not actually just one long wall, it's a bunch of walls built by different dynasties scattered all over the country.
yQv6M TIL Cotton in pill bottles serves no purpose today (actually recommended to remove), but is a continued practice because consumers got used it. It was first inserted by Bayer in the early 1900s so their powdery pills wouldn’t break.
OoABe TIL that natural evolution did not create a chicken that lays so many unfertilized eggs. Human engineering created such chickens. You could call the process "human-caused evolution", "artificial selection", or "selective breeding".