› added 1 year ago

115

TIL In central China, villagers used to consume dinosaur fossils as traditional medicine, believing they were the bones of ancient flying dragons with special healing powers for various illnesses.

Read more nbcnews.com

via reddit.com

GDkJ TIL that back in the day, a lot of professional middle-class blacks always traveled with a chauffeur’s hat. The reason: If they were driving a nice new car through a small southern town, they didn’t want police officers, or any other whites, to know the car belonged to them.
yVbLa TIL that Able Archer 83 was a war exercise conducted by NATO that panicked the Soviets into thinking they were really being attacked and so nearly launched a nuclear retaliation in response; it is now considered to be the nearest that mankind went into nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis
9RDQ TIL Marvel created a superhero, Blue Ear, who wears a hearing aid solely because a 4 year old boy refused to wear one, stating “superheroes don’t wear hearing aids”.
D5Nr TIL Patent trolls (more formally non-practicing entities that hold a patent) now account for 61% of all patent litigation (up from 5% 10 years ago), and lose 91% of all cases. Research has said these cases have caused half a trillion, and nearly $80 billion annually, in wealth loss since 1990.
rdpy TIL that while filming Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick tricked George C. Scott into acting more ridiculously than Scott wanted. He convinced Scott to do over the top practice takes, saying they’d never be used, to warm up. Kubrick used these takes and Scott swore never to work with Kubrick again.