› added 1 year ago

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TIL of Antonio Meucci, an Italian American who invented the telephone, but economic problems and his difficulty in communicating in English prevented him from being recognized as its inventor

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9Y14X TIL: The USA long held the record for having the World's Tallest Chair --until 2014 when St. Florian, Austria's, great Lutz chair left much worldwide lesser giant furniture in the dust. XXXLutz and Holzleimbauwerk Wiehag GmbH worked together to build the epic seat that stands almost 100 feet tall.
8aOVZ TIL: At Major League Baseball parks, one doesn't see local dirt (sandy in Florida, farmland black in the MidWest, etc) but rather a standardized clay-rich orange "infield mix." Over 20 stadiums use dirt "imported" from Slippery Rock, PA. The official dirt is shipped in and mixed with regional sand.
9XQX TIL:DNA barcoding was used to discover that of 1215 seafood samples from 674 restaurants and grocery stores in 21 U.S. states, a full third were mislabeled; The menu says red snapper, but it’s actually tilapia. The white tuna, meanwhile, is really escolar, while the seabass is Antarctic toothfish.
BjoW TIL that the scent of a woman crying triggers a dramatic decrease in levels of testosterone and sexual arousal in the majority of men. And that men are subconsciously able to differentiate between genuine tears, and those that are forced.
LkEmQ TIL Bebop jazz (very fast & difficult to play) evolved partially because many black people felt that white people were simply copying their jazz - some believed the new style would be too hard to be copied and not to white peoples' taste