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TIL that Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the International Olympic Committee, won an Olympic gold medal for himself in 1912 - with a poem. 'Ode to Sport' won in the category for literature. Previous Olympic events also included architecture, music, painting and sculpture, until 1948.

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Oopp7 TIL that ants sleep but not in the sense we understand sleep. Research into sleep patterns of insects showed that ants have a cyclical pattern of resting periods which each nest as a group observes, lasting around eight minutes in any 12-hour period.
8aJ0K TIL in 1964 on Long Island, N.Y., 7-Eleven became the first chain to offer fresh coffee in to-go cups. The company expanded to-go coffee to nationwide. By the end of the decade, coffee lids began to come into their own too. In 1967, Philadelphian Alan Frank filed a patent for a tearable coffee lid.
nnrd TIL the “Spanish Flu” was so called because during WWI the warring countries censored the news of the plague to maintain morale while neutral Spanish didn’t.
6wg7 TIL that before his ‘Goosebumps’ books made him a household name, R.L. Stine was the creator and head writer for Nick Jr.’s Eureeka’s Castle (1989-1995)
e0BnE TIL 50%—80% of your poop (excluding water) is bacteria that had been living in your intestines. Many of the bacteria in poop are still alive, but some are dead—carcasses of species that bloomed as they fed on the indigestible plant matter you consumed, then died shortly afterward.