› added 11 years ago

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TIL Tobacco is fertilized with radioactive apatite, the radiation received from smoking a pack a day per year compares to receiving 2,000 modern chest x-rays a year.

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rNw9y TIL Baby gorillas are curious and will pull colourful items such as shoes, clothing, or dyed hair that they see on tourists. A baby in Rwanda once picked up a glove that tourist dropped, and the angry silverback confiscated it and threw it back at the tourist
Z8jAD TIL Roger Cotes, a young astronomy professor at Cambridge, forced Newton to confront his mistakes in his work, Principia, and corrected many of them for him. Cotes bombarded Newton with letters for years, repeatedly challenging his experimental results as well as his theoretical calculations
a8kQZ TIL "zoanthropy" is a psychological pathology wherein a person believes that they are a type of non-human animal. E. G. "clinical lycanthropy", the belief that they turn into a wolf.
a8rdo TIL the first email was sent in 1971, almost two decades before the World Wide Web existed
p8d4Z TIL In 2011 billionaire Oprah Winfrey found out she has a sister she never knew existed and now takes care of her financially because Oprah was so impressed by her sisters loyalty. She spent 4 years trying to contact Oprah with no luck and never once tried to sell the story to the press.