› added 3 months ago

15

TIL the red phone, the hotline between USA and Russia has never been a phone and was never red

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

8aKgb TIL Quarantine is from Italian 'quaranta giorni', meaning "forty days", used in 14th-15th-century Venetian dialect and designating the period that all ships were required to be isolated before passengers and crew could go ashore during the Black Death plague epidemic
WK9N TIL that to produce black widow spider antivenom, horses are injected with black widow spider venom, then bled and antibodies are extracted.
x6oyw TIL it took around 3 billion years for the very first single-celled organisms to eventually evolve into basic animal life forms. For comparison, dinosaurs were around for about 165 million years, modern humans have been around for 300,000 years.
Okkg TIL when when Android was unveiled in 2007, Nokia was quoted as saying “we don’t see this as a threat,” and a member of Microsoft’s Windows Mobile team stated “I don’t understand the impact that they are going to have.”
awgGM TIL Comedian Jenny Slate was effectively fired from SNL after accidentaly uttering the word "fucking" in the first scene of her first episode on the show. The experience led her to develop stage fright which she had to overcome through therapy