› added 13 years ago

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TIL that some wasps are smaller than single celled organisms. They miniaturize sucessfully by foregoing nuclei in their brains.

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0wxLA TIL British livestock auctions still quote price in guineas even though guineas stopped being used in 1816.
VBRk0 TIL the 1970s rock band Bay City Rollers, known for the pop hit "Saturday Night", was a Scottish band that wanted an American name, so they brainstormed by throwing darts at a US map. They declined Arkansas from the first dart, but the second dart landed on Bay City, Michigan.
5V9Z8 TIL that in 1726, an Englishwoman from Surrey tricked doctors into believing that she had given birth to rabbits
BgBnd TIL an analysis of Beethoven's hair found high levels of lead, arsenic & mercury. The high amount of lead in particular likely contributed to his deafness. One lock of hair had 380 micrograms per gram & a second one had 258 micrograms. A normal level of lead is around 4 micrograms or less per gram.
0krp TIL during the Holocaust one Jewish woman exposed between 600 and 3000 hiding Jews to the Gestapo to prevent her family from being sent to a concentration camp. Even after the Nazis sent her parents and husband to Auschwitz anyway in 1943, she continued to work for the Gestapo until 1945