› added 7 years ago

91

TIL that Morocco was the first nation to recognise the United States following their independence following a friendship Sultan Mohammed III of Morocco who declared US ships protected from Barbary pirates.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

Yp9Rr TIL of the Great Attractor, a gravitational anomaly suggesting a concentration of mass thousands of times more massive than our entire galaxy. However, it is obscured by the Zone of Avoidance (the Milky Way’s galactic plane), making it very difficult to directly observe.
rRxmd TIL,"the Stopped Clock Illusion". Rapidly move your eyes away from a clock and back to it, and you will notice the second hand taking more time to move than expected. The brain filters the blurry images you see in-between while moving your eyes and replaces it with the image of first thing you see.
VV8k TIL that due to a popular anime cartoon, thousands of raccoons were imported from North America for Japanese children to keep as pets. When the cartoon’s protagonist later released his raccoon into the wild on the show, many of the pet owners did the same, creating chaos in the ecosystem to this day
yQA6a TIL of Susanne Ripton, a Jew who survived the holocaust as a child. In 1940, when she was 4, soldiers broke into her home in Paris. She was saved when a neighbour rushed in and said that she was her daughter. She spent years hiding. In 1969, she discovered her parents had been killed at Auschwitz.
6E4xX TIL That "Piss Shivers", or shivering after you pee, has official terminology; post-micturition convulsion syndrome or PMCS and is more common among men.