› added 9 years ago

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TIL up to 80% of olive oil sold in America is fake oil manufactured by the Italian Mafia

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kJgR7 TIL That a couple, Lélia and Sebastião Salgado, planted 2 million trees over 18 years to restore a forest. They founded the Terra Institute and worked to revive the ecosystem
PD8E TIL: There is a 500-year-old Beer Purity Law still in effect today in Germany. It was decreed on April 23, 1516, by Munich’s Duke Wilhelm, protecting the country’s beer drinkers from contaminants, chemicals and any other additives that unsavory merchants might have thought of adding.
epQbn TIL the USA doesn't use the metric system because in 1793, literal Pirates of the Caribbean looted the ship carrying the "official kilogram" and it never reached its intended destination (the US gov't).
ErD0 TIL that over the last 35 years, a portion of the scientific community involved in researching domestic violence has been actively concealing and misrepresenting the evidence for “Gender Symmetry”: the fact that women and men perpetrate partner violence at comparable rates [PDF]
e0K15 TIL That ACME in the Looney Tunes Cartoons was supposed to be ironic. Acme comes from a Greek word meaning "pinnacle" or "peak" implying "the peak of greatness" and that the product would be the best you could get. Any product with the name in the show was guaranteed to fail spectacularly.