› added 6 years ago

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TIL California Endangered Species Act doesn't include protection provisions for insects; instead of trying to add insects to the act, a group of environmentalists tried to get bees categorized as fish because the act's definition of fish includes animals without backbones.

Read more news.bloombergenvironment.com

via reddit.com

wLPxM TIL that a picture of a giant robot helping Russia revolutionaries storm the winter palace in 1917, was accidentally used in an Australian history exam. Some students wasted time in trying to figure out what the giant robot was, thinking it was a statue of a Russian politician or a battleship.
b1m0 TIL of a species of Sea Cow over 10 times the size of Manatees that Europeans hunted to extinction in just 27 years
LQM8Q TIL that the Indian mathematician and astronomer Baudhayana, who lived around 800 BCE, wrote the Baudhayana Sulba Sutra, which describes the construction of various geometric shapes using a rope known as a "sulba” with precise geometric measurements, the Pythagorean theorem, area of a circle.
XENxj TIL that the longest confirmed record of sperm storage in a female vertebrate to date belongs to a rattlesnake. Using DNA analyses, researchers confirmed that a female eastern diamond-backed rattlesnake was able to store viable sperm for at least 67 months before giving birth to a healthy brood.
xYbD TIL Scientists discovered in 2015 that Boa Constrictors kill their prey by cutting off their blood supply, not by suffocation like it was originally assumed.