› added 6 years ago

85

TIL that particle physicist John Ellis lost a bet and had to include the word "penguin" in his next scientific paper. After struggling to find a way to include the word, he "smoked some illegal substance" which gave him the inspiration for the now important Penguin Diagrams.

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Y7mgv TIL gum isn’t biodegradable. 105 tonnes of “gum” trash are produced each year.
a8Nmo TIL that in recent years, dozens of North Korean "ghost ships," often with deceased crew members onboard, have washed up along the Japanese coast.
rNGPW TIL that during WWII Boeing built a huge factory and camouflaged it by building a completely fake town on top of it so it would look like a suburban neighborhood from the air
vE0r TIL that Robert Downey Jr. was allowed by his father to smoke marijuana at the age of six.
OowQR TIL that for hundreds of years Europeans practiced medicinal cannibalism and in 1910, a German pharmaceutical catalog was still selling mummies for medicinal purposes.