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TIL that the instrument in Samba music that makes a sound like rubbing a balloon or a McDonalds straw in a cup is a percussion instrument called a cuica.

nejvb TIL that tongue twister 'she sells seashells by the seashore' is about a real girl named Mary Anning. She also happened to be one of the very first people to discover a massive dinosaur fossil, which she did at age 12 while looking for seashells to sell by the seashore.
klp7 TIL: The Enterprise’s captain was originally James R. Kirk, and it was changed to “T” for “Tiberius” later in the series
oBZmY You obviously can’t see it when you gaze up at the night sky, but Earth has a whole lot of junk floating around in orbit. There are all kinds of reasons why debris ends up orbiting Earth and many of the objects are discarded pieces of other spacecraft or long-dead satellites which have no use to anyone. Sometimes these objects crash into each other and create even more, smaller pieces of space junk which can damage active satellites and even pose a danger to astronauts.
wgZY TIL Only 20-33% of the words in the English dictionary are Germanic in origin, but among the 25 top nouns, verbs and adjectives the percentages are 60%, 80% and 68%, respectively.
GYOl1 TIL: In order to get improvements in their job security amidst the emergence of a rival bus line, bus drivers in Okayama, Japan decided to go on strike in a unique way in 2018. While on strike, they supported the community by continuing to drive their routes, but simply not charging customers.