› added 11 months ago

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TIL Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, a French entomologist, living in Medford, Mass. in the late 1800s, decided to create a cross-breed of caterpillars from native North American moths and European caterpillars Lymantria dispar, in order to start a competitive silk industry. (rest of the story in comment)

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yMZe TIL A professor is able to predict with 91% accuracy if a married couple will stay together based on the number of positive comments they make to negative ones. Couples with a 5:1 ratio tend to stay together.
nePkW TIL of Mandeville's 1714 story of a thriving bee community that decides to live by virtue instead of self-interest - and collapses. Adam Smith incorporated this idea of 'private vice, public good' into his work, and today its a foundational principle of Capitalism and Western Civilisation.
6Epx7 TIL that Turks and Caicos, a major salt producing area, drew salt mounds on it's crest in 1889. When sent to London, igloos were drawn on it because they didn't know where the Turks and Caicos were. This was replaced by a flamingo crest in 1965.
nnrd TIL the “Spanish Flu” was so called because during WWI the warring countries censored the news of the plague to maintain morale while neutral Spanish didn’t.
dDxQZ TIL that the 'Nuclear Gandhi' bug in Civilization never existed, has been dismissed by the developers and was just a urban legend/mandela effect.