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TIL Downtown Houston's Sam Houston Park preserves a green oasis filled with historic homes dating from the 1800s, surrounded by freeways and skycrapers. Since the 1950s, a group of Houstonians made efforts to save many fine old buildings from demolition

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XE1Q6 TIL that loofah sponges come from luffa plants; a species of gourd with edible fruits. Once dried and peeled they reveal a matrix of tough fibrous tissues inside that act as wonderful natural sponges
b9Vb0 TIL of composer Frank Churchill, who worked on early Disney films Snow White, Bambi and Dumbo, winning an Oscar for Dumbo. In 1942, just months before the release of Bambi, he shot himself, purportedly "at the piano." He received two posthumous Oscar nominations for his work on the film.
rOK0 TIL a chemical, Cabergoline, has been clinically shown to eliminate the male refractory period, “thereby allowing men to experience multiple ejaculatory orgasms in rapid succession.”
R7EA9 TIL in WWII, the Japanese ambassador to Nazi Germany became one of the Western Allies greatest and highest-level sources in Berlin, offering up information on the invasion of the Soviet Union, German defenses at the Atlantic Wall, and more...without ever knowing his cables had been decrypted
1XEr TIL that the “rules of the food game in America are organized in such a way that if you are eating on a budget, the most rational economic strategy is to eat badly — and get fat. Adam Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots.