› added 5 years ago

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TIL of Maria Sibylla Merian, the naturalist who discovered the life cycle of butterflies and insects, painted them in breathtakingly accurate watercolors, and braved the jungles of Africa with her daughter to greatly advance the science of entomology.

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via reddit.com

VMjBD TIL that Henry Ford had initially lead the movement of shorter working weeks from the entrepreneurial side of things. He (counterintuitively at the time) showed that shorter working hours led to higher productivity.
e8dn TIL that ‘Inside the Actor’s Studio’ host James Lipton is 90 years old.
9Yx1G TIL that Richard Feynman created an assembly line of female mathematicians to simulate a computer during the Manhattan Project because the actual computers from IBM were delayed in arriving to Los Alamos. Turns out their "system" could calculate just as fast (just not round-the-clock).
AN0V7 TIL that multiple sclerosis is more common in people who live farther from the equator and the cause of this geographical pattern is not clear.
MeY9A TIL in WWII, weather reports were censored to prevent enemy submarines from learning about conditions. A football game in Chicago was so covered in fog that the radio announcer couldn't see the field, but afterwards he was officially thanked for never using the word "fog" or mentioning the weather.