› added 3 years ago

162

TIL flies find it hard to land on striped surfaces, & zebras suffer far less from flies, which carry deadly diseases. Zebra stripes are more pronounced in environments that favour horseflies

Read more bbc.com

via reddit.com

VBn1B TIL Carrie Fisher’s ashes were placed inside a giant Prozac Pill
j6x1n TIL about parfilage, a fashionable pastime among upper class ladies in 18th century France in which they would painstakingly destroy textile goods, thread by thread in a deliberate reversal of normal "women's work", sometimes even having things made specifically for that purpose
6nDX TIL the standard measurement of the kg for the past 127 years is ‘Le Grand K’, a platinum and iridium cylinder that was forged in 1879 and currently resides inside a vault in France.
R7lAa TIL of the Tarantula Hawk, a giant member of the wasp family whose sting is described as an "immediate, excruciating, unrelenting pain that simply shuts down one's ability to do anything, except scream. Mental discipline simply does not work in these situations." It's the state insect of New Mexico.
jNd7M TIL that the IRS and the USPS both have a plan in place in case of a nuclear war. The IRS has an employee handbook called the "Internal Revenue Manual" that details how to collect taxes after the nukes. The USPS will continue delivering mail and has 60 million change-of-adress forms prepared.