› added 11 years ago

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TIL: One out of every four animals on Earth is a beetle

Read more insects.about.com

via reddit.com

rbad TIL fly swatters have holes because it doesn’t press an air current towards the fly, so he can’t feel it coming.
kOOX4 TIL that, in his book Natural History, roman philosopher Pliny the Elder adviced to "rub the teeth with ashes of burnt mouse-dung and honey" for the bad breath.
eppRJ TIL that people with red hair are more sensitive to pain and more resistant to local anesthesia due to the MC1R gene. They may require up to 20% more general anesthesia (such as Novocaine)
DWRr TIL a platinum weight kept in a French vault that defines a perfect kg keeps experiencing minor fluctuations in mass. Now a perfect crystal sphere that took two years to polish and has a fixed number of atoms is being developed as the new standard
wNJ1 TIL bananas are actually used for scale… for measuring radioactivity