› added 6 years ago

167

TIL that one acre of hemp can produce as much paper (including toilet paper!) as four acres of trees.

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j6Xen TIL about Prosthaphaeresis, a technique that uses trigonometric identities to quickly approximate a product of 2 numbers by turning it into an addition. It was the only known technique to do so, preceding by 25 years the discovery of the logarithm
e5wk TIL that while many woodland creatures harbor ticks and spread Lyme disease, opossums kill 96.5% of ticks that land on them and that a single opossum may be “hoovering up and killing” 4,000 ticks every week and thereby protecting us from Lyme disease
Rxd8 TIL that zookeepers’ pregnancy test for polar bears is to have a specially trained beagle from Cincinnati sniff the bear’s poop.
kRP7 TIL the average American dental student now graduates with $261,149 in debt.
vPRaB TIL that coconut crabs and some other hermit crabs have Branchiostegal lungs (considered to be a developmental stage between gills and lungs) besides gills and will drown if submerged for too long. They also have the ability to smell things in the air.