› added 3 years ago

366

TIL If you totally sleep-deprive a white-crowned sparrow in the laboratory during the migratory period of the year, it suffers virtually no ill effects whatsoever. The US government continues to have a vested interest in this sparrow: their hope for developing a 24-hour soldier.

Read more ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

via reddit.com

L7xr TIL of Leslie Coffelt, who was killed defending Harry Truman from an assassination attempt. Shot by an assassin 4 times, Coffelt propped himself up against a guard booth and fired one shot, hitting the assassin in the head and killing him. Coffelt collapsed immediately and died four hours later.
oeAL TIL that Andre Geim won the satirical Ig Nobel Prize in 2000 for his work on using magnetism to levitate a frog. 10 years later, his experiments regarding graphene won him the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics. This makes him the only ever recipient of both the Ig Nobel and Nobel Prizes.
a86w9 TIL Chicken Katsu was invented in the late 1800s by a Tokyo restaurant that wanted to offer a European-style meat cutlet to British businessmen
KYYV4 TIL that George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" was originally titled "The Last Man in Europe", Orwell later considered "1980" and "1982" before settling on "1984". The title was not just an inversion of the year it was written (1948) which is often suggested.
d8Xwr TIL that the penalty for placing a sales call to a number on the Do Not Call list is $40,654 per call.