› added 12 years ago

89

TIL Beer steins originally did not have lids. They were added during the age of the Black Plague, to prevent diseased fleas from getting into the beer.

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0bjL TIL Stanley Williams, co-founder and leader of the Crips, was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2001, after writing several children’s books urging kids ‘not to make the same mistakes he did’. He was executed in 2005 on charges of quadruple homicide.
p8poA TIL that all the dogs who played Lassie were male and were all descended from the initial Lassie, a collie named Pal
GY6EE TIL: The reason that Moths are attracted to light is because prior to man-made artificial lighting, they used the light of the moon to help them navigate, so they mistake lights with light of the moon!
J1rdl TIL an amateur historian in Rhode Island unearthed an Arabic coin believed to be part of the most profitable act of piracy in history - the 1695 capture of an Indian fleet and treasure by the English pirate Henry Every, estimated to by worth $400 million in today's money.
xVdN1 TIL that there is a gene that leads to near-sightedness when children begin reading at a young age. Over 44 percent of adults in the US are now nearsighted, up from 25 percent in the 1980s.