› added 5 years ago

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TIL about the "Wow! signal", the strongest candidate for an alien radio transmission ever detected, received in 1977, by the Big Ear radio telescope in Ohio.

XKBk TIL the Chinese government forced prisoners to farm World of Warcraft gold. “There were 300 prisoners forced to play games. We worked 12-hour shifts in the camp. I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [£470-570] a day. We didn’t see any of the money. The computers were never turned off.”
lo08N TIL Octopuses have many neurons in their tentacles such that a severed tentacle can continue reacting to stimuli even after they are no longer connected to the main brain. If you put food near a severed tentacle it will even try to feed it to a mouth that’s not there.
QXg6 TIL the Grateful Dead provided funding for the Lithuanian national basketball team for the 1992 Olympics since the squad could not afford to participate. They wore tie-died jerseys during games and donned full Dead regalia during the medal ceremony for winning 3rd place.
B9Br TIL in the originally filmed ending of “I Am Legend,” Will Smith realizes he is the “monster” and the zombies have only been protecting themselves from him. The studio insisted on a replacement “happy ending”, which implies the discovery of a “cure” and nothing of the zombies’ humanity.
LQRKp TIL the "YKK" on your zipper stands for Yoshida Kogyo Kabushikikaisha, the Japanese company that makes over half the world’s zippers.