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The most popular artificial material on Earth isn’t steel, plastic, or aluminum — it’s concrete. Thousands of years ago, we used it to build civilizations, but then our knowledge of how to make it was lost. Here’s how we discovered concrete, forgot it, and then finally cracked the mystery of what makes it so strong.

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xV9wb TIL that chocolate milk was made popular by an Irishman named Sir Hans Sloane when he was visiting Jamaica and was offered a cocoa powder drink by the villagers and thought it tasted foul, so he mixed it with milk instead and brought it back to England where it was sold as medicine.
OGLe4 TIL about the uncanny valley, which describes the unsettling feeling caused by a robot or computer generated model that looks almost human but is not convincing enough to look like an actual human
Z8OQ4 TIL about Monte Testaccio, an ancient artificial mound in Rome in which more than 50 Million pieces of Roman pottery were discarded. It was in operation till the 3rd century AD.
R5DWa TIL Lettvin et al. remarked that a frog "will starve to death surrounded by food if it is not moving"; it won't see the [stationary] food due to a general lack of head/eye movements, which lead to visual fading
ojL8 TIL that in 1971, on the day before Bangladesh officially won its Liberation War, Pakistani soldiers kidnapped the brightest Bengali intellectuals–writers, philosophers, historians, mathematicians, physicists, poets–and slaughtered them in the middle of the night.