› added 5 years ago

80

TIL of Lydia Fairchild a mother from Washington State who's accused of fraud & kidnapping her own children. During application for government assistance, DNA test shows she has no connection to her kids. It turned out she has chimerism, she has 2 sets of DNA, the reason for the maternal test anomaly

Read more lifedaily.com

via reddit.com

16ARX TIL that Ancient Romans added lead syrup to wine to improve color, flavor, and to prevent fermentation. The average Roman aristocrat consumed up to 250μg of lead daily. Some Roman texts implicate chronic lead poisoning in the mental deterioration of Nero, Caligula, and other Roman Emperors.
9yKM TIL spelling bees are a particularly American/British phenomenon. Other languages spell their words so intuitively that one can easily spell them just by hearing them. English, on the other hand, contains Latin, Greek, Germanic, etc. roots, not to mention whole words borrowed from other languages.
NXgVN TIL that the longest professional baseball game in history occurred in 1981 and was 33 innings long, ending at 4am
Oo6kL TIL dogs have musical tastes. The Scottish SPCA and University of Glasgow monitored dogs' heartrates while playing different kinds of music and found that most dogs "prefer reggae and soft rock," though each individual dog also had its own preferences.
VMpO4 TIL when forensic science was in its infancy, a woman - who developed the legal medicine department in Harvard - created doll houses depicting crime scenes. These early tools were used to teach crime scene analysis.