› added 8 years ago

451

TIL There’s a name for jolting awake as you fall asleep, it’s called a “hypnic jerk” and it’s caused by a tussle between different parts of your brain.

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0J8M TIL eighty percent of all animal species on Earth have six or more legs.
VPD8 TIL that if humans could accelerate their arms at one tenth of the speed that a mantis shrimp does, we could throw a baseball into orbit.
A9en TIL there is a Japanese company that creates and sells giant pilot-able mechs as art pieces. The price? $1.35 million, before options
BZ4W TIL that author Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a 50,000 word novel without using the letter “e”. To this day it is considered one of the finest examples of constrained writing.
l7M1a TIL The earliest known examples of the merit system for selecting bureaucrats based on their ability (rather than their political connections or high birth) date back to the Qin and Han dynasties of China, between the 3rd Century BCE and 2nd Century CE.