› added 6 years ago

211

TIL Greek Folklore says kids born between Christmas and Epiphany (January 6) are considered doomed to become kallikantzaros, a kind of half-human, half-demon vampire - with talons that lives in the underworld and comes back to Earth to tear its family members to pieces during the Christmas holidays.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

e069E TIL that Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, rejected religion, and considered himself a humanist. Around age 14 he concluded that religion was nonsense. According to Ronald D. Moore, Roddenberry "felt very strongly that contemporary Earth religions would be gone by the 23rd century."
8eQNa TIL that there is a fudge factory in Missouri that goes by the name of Uranus. You can buy fudge in Uranus.
QJbQE TIL since human civilization, 83% of wild mammals, 80% of marine mammals, 50% of plants and 15% of fish have vanished. Mammal biomass is 60% livestock, 36% is human, and only 4% wild. 70% of birds are domestic.
9Y7Mr TIL that Johan de Witt the Prime Minister of the Dutch Republic was so unpopular at the time of his death in 1672 that the angry mob that killed him also ate his body
JYa4 TIL that more people died building German V-2 Rockets than were actually killed by them