› added 11 years ago

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TIL that the tumbling tumbleweed (Kali tragus), a long standing symbol of the lonely American West, is actually a foreign introduced species from Asia commonly called ‘Russian thistle’.

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oR9xo TIL of Tomtex, a fake leather made from chitosan, a bio-polymer extracted from waste seafood shells. Unlike other leather alternatives TomTex is not mixed with PVC or polyurethane
b9XYQ TIL that after Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933 - 1945) the US hasn't had a President who speaks fluently a second language.
rRyKx TIL: NYC subway's signal technology is nearly a century old, and signal operators don't know precisely where each car is on the tracks at any given time.
mxXBo TIL Because of the shorter commercial breaks in the United Kingdom, every episode of The Muppet Show had two minutes of additional footage. Usually consisting of a skit or a short song.
1akp4 TIL on visitng Kiev after WW2, John Steinbeck wrote: "If the United States were completely destroyed from New York to Kansas, we would have about the area of destruction Ukraine has. If six million people were killed, not counting soldiers,... you would have an idea of the casualties of Ukraine."