› added 7 years ago

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People who have a lot of papillae—the bumps on our tongue, most of which house our taste buds—often find flavors overwhelming. They’re “supertasters,” and as such they add cream to their coffee and order food mild instead of spicy. Subtasters, on the other hand, have low papillae density and prefer their chicken wings “atomic.”

waJ7 TIL of the Mountains of Kong, a West African mountain range that was charted on maps for nearly a hundred years. It was later discovered that the mountains never existed and were made up by the original cartographer.
rRG8d TIL that Plessy in the infamous Plessy v Fergusen case was actually a white guy that considered himself as 1/8th black. He had walked into a white only train cart, went up to a conductor and told him this so that he would be arrested and could file suit to try and get the segregation law overturned.
5YXrp TIL of Normal Borlaug, the man who saved a billion lives. In the 1970's, he developed a new strain of wheat that was heavily disease resistant and could grow in very arid conditions. Between 1965 and 1970, Pakistan, Mexico, and India more than doubled their food supplies.
p8g7A TIL that the US military was so unprepared leading up to WWII, General George Patton personally bought tools and parts from the Sears-Roebuck mail order catalog to get the 2nd Armored Division to operational status.
rRvLw TIL that the copyright for Anne Franke's diary was due to expire in 2016. To prevent it from falling into public domain, in 2015 the Anne Frank foundation added her father Otto Frank as a co-author.