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TIL that Michael Jackson narrated E.T. the Extraterrestrial's audiobook album. After taking home a record eight Grammys, seven for his album Thriller and one for E.T., he said that out of all of them he was "most proud of this one".

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R55r9 TIL Osama bin Laden's mother-in-law collapsed and died of shock on news of his death
1an54 TIL Cuban cigar factories hire "lectores" who read stories to the cigar-makers. [Video, 2:15]
P1DYw TIL More about the shady US involvements in South America that isn't talked enough about. Called neocolonialism summarized a little in this video. Makes you question yourself, how much institutional bias have you absorbed over the years without even realizing it?
gMLr4 TIL, it takes a photon up to 100,000 years to travel to the surface of the sun but only 8 minutes for it to then reach the earth.
KOO7Q Imagine yourself at a concert hall looking at a symphonic orchestra on stage. Have you ever noticed that high-pitched strings sit left of low-pitched strings? Going from left to right, one usually sees violins, violas, cellos and double basses. That is, one moves from high pitches on the left to low pitches on the right. Why? The orchestra’s arrangement is not a cultural oddity, like driving on the right side of the road. Rather, it is due to our own biological makeup. Higher pitches tend to be better processed by the left hemisphere of the brain, while lower pitches tend to be better processed by a similar region in the right hemisphere. This organisation is thought to have repercussions far beyond music, perhaps even helping to explain why language is mostly processed in the left hemisphere. So the part of my brain that better processes high sounds sits where the higher-pitched instruments sit: on the left. But that’s not the end of the story.