› added 6 years ago

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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."

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mM4E TIL Lasers removal doesn’t ‘remove’ the tattoo. It just helps break it down so white blood cells can carry it away. Eventually, you poo out your tattoo.
j6GmQ TIL about the United States of Europe, a hypothetical scenario of European integration leading to the formation of a sovereign superstate (similar to the USA), organized as a federation of the member countries of the European Union (EU).
VM68m TIL 'fight or flight' is actually a description of the male response to acute stress. The female response can be more accurately described as 'tend and befriend'. This has implications for how we think about what stress does to our bodies and how best to cope with and recover from it.
7rngb TIL until 1987, there was no TV broadcast in Iceland on Thursdays. The idea behind the decision was to reserve Thursdays as a day for socializing. As a result, many Icelanders born before 1987 joke that they were most likely conceived on a Thursday.
8gMa TIL the word “mesmerize” comes from 18th century German physician Franz Mesmer, who used the sounds from Benjamin Franklin’s glass armonica to induce “animal magnetism” in patients. “Animal magnetism” would later be renamed “hypnosis” by Scottish surgeon James Braid in 1841.