› added 5 years ago

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TIL Wilson's storm petrels, named after the father of American ornithology Alexander Wilson, don’t actually walk on water, but they aim themselves into the wind, hover over an area, and slowly advance while touching their feet to the water’s surface like a bouncing dance as they search for food.

65kY TIL in 1992, a Lawyer and a Judge were looking for files on a former prisoner in a police station near Paraguay. Instead, they stumbled upon archives documenting an international conspiracy involving the torture, murder, and imprisonment of 480,000 people, now known as the Archives of Terror.
Vak4 TIL Net-casting spiders’ (Deinopidae) spiders eyes are more sensitive than cats or owls, which they use for hunting at night. So sensitive, in fact, that they need to rebuild their retinas every day because they are destroyed at dawn.
NN7P TIL that Tsar Peter the Great of Russia learned shipbuilding at a dock in Amsterdam after disguising himself as a common craftsman and worked on constructing the ships himself.
lovZ5 TIL there is a subset of people that can function perfectly fine with less than 5 hours of sleep. They are early birds, night owls and short sleepers at the same time and do not need the assistance of coffee or mid-day naps to function. They are the Sleepless Elite.
wLBOJ TIL that the animal that causes the most human deaths annually in the US is deer. Deer sometimes leap blindly into roadways causing tens of thousands of traffic accidents annually. These accidents cause an estimated 200 deaths every year. Runner-up: Bees, wasps and hornets with 58 deaths.