› added 9 years ago

143

TIL that mushrooms can create a slight breeze even when the air is calm. They release water vapour, cooling the air and creating a convective current that gets the air moving, carrying spores away from the parent.

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9YPxB TIL The croissant is not really French. It was inspired by the Austrian kipfel that dates back to at least 1227.
AD5Od TIL that there’s a conspiracy theory that the 1985 NBA Draft Lottery was rigged so that the New York Knicks would win, so that they could draft Patrick Ewing
7rApb TIL Alexander Graham Bell offered to sell his telephone patent to Western Union for $100,000 in 1876. The committee appointed to investigate the offer concluded the telephone was "hardly more than a toy" and "inherently of no use to us".
e06p5 TIL that the drink Crystal Pepsi was killed in the US due to a "kamikaze" marketing campaign by Coke. Coke created the drink Tab Clear, designed to be unpopular, and marketed it so that consumers would conflate the two drinks even though they were not similar. It worked and both were pulled in 1994.
J9oQ TIL XXX on cartoon jugs of alcohol originally denoted three time distilled, resulting in almost pure alcohol content.