TIL Spiders might dream. New study finds evidence of REM-like movement in arachnids (boingboing.net)
TIL Bob Barker was an enrolled member of the Sioux Tribe and grew up on a reservation in South Dakota (en.wikipedia.org)
TIL The average POTUS has been charged with two felonies. (thepoliticswatcher.com)
til you can make soda from pine needles (www.growforagecookferment.com) French
TIL in 1985 French government agents bombed and sank a Greenpeace ship docked in Auckland, New Zealand, killing a freelance photographer (en.m.wikipedia.org)
TIL of research into genetically engineering humans for space and living on other planets. (www.space.com)
One method is epigenome engineering and would target genes advantageous for space. Another method is to combine the DNA of other species (i.e. tardigrades) with human cells to make humans better fit for space....
TIL that up to 3.7% of pregnancies have misattributed paternity where the child (and possibly the mother) thought the father was someone else (www.newyorker.com)
TIL Cass Elliot died in Harry Nilsson's apartment, and four years later Keith Moon died in the same room (en.wikipedia.org)
TIL Boeing, NASA, and United Airlines test sustainable aviation fuel (innovationorigins.com)
TIL The first recorded human death by robot was in 1979 when 25-year-old Ford Motor assembly line worker Robert William was struck by an arm of a malfunctioning one-ton robot (www.wikiwand.com)
Williams was one of three operators of the parts retrieval system, a five-story robot built by the Unit Handling Systems division of Litton Industries. The robot was designed to retrieve castings from high density storage shelves at the Flat Rock plant. Part of the machine included one-ton transfer vehicles, which were carts on...
TIL that 80% of Australian homes are colder than is recommended by the WHO safety standards for indoor air temperature. (www.theguardian.com)
Rentals in NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and ACT dropped below 18C more than 80% of the time, report finds
TIL Private Prison stocks skyrocketed when Trump was first elected (www.thestreet.com)
TIL about the Crackpot Index, a humorous post for people who claim to have disproved Einstein's theory (math.ucr.edu)
A scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory replied to my email with a curt, please don’t waste my time again. The head of the Physics Department at the University of Miami dropped Bob’s research paper like it was radioactive. He receives one of these papers each week, he said. It turns out, there is a whole community...
TIL the fortune-telling practice of Tyromancy uses cheese to predict the future. (www.saveur.com)
TIL that player behaviors to a software bug that created a pandemic in World of Warcraft had similarities to COVID-19 in the real world (en.wikipedia.org)
… researchers noted the similarities between the game and the real-world pandemics. Both had an immediate impact on dense urban areas, which limited the effectiveness of containment procedures in stopping the spread of disease, while air travel, like fast travel, allowed infections to spread across large parts of the world...
TIL: The ancient Greek philosopher Plato has a IMDB page and is credited as a writer (and actor for some reason) (www.imdb.com)
For cities of 1 millon up, Chicago is the most violent in USA (en.m.wikipedia.org)
Chicago vs. worst ranking, based on...
TIL The name "flashlight" came from the first lights that could only briefly illuminate because the batteries couldn’t hold a charge for long periods of time (blog.bulbhead.com)
David Misell, an English inventor, invented the first flashlight and patented it in 1899. It used three D batteries in a tube that was used as the handle of the device. The batteries supplied enough power to create light through an incandescent bulb....
TIL - Henry Ford built a failed community called “Fordlândia” in Brazil, he planned it as an industrial utopia. (99percentinvisible.org)
TIL of Dead Internet Theory that asserts the Internet now consists almost entirely of bot activity and automatically generated content (en.wikipedia.org)
TIL: There was an animated tv show based on the children's book series Busytown called The Busy World of Richard Scarry (en.wikipedia.org)
Busytown
TIL about the TRAPPIST-1 Star System (en.wikipedia.org)
(it’s not a solar system because Sol is our star, specifically; we’re the only Solar system)...
TIL that in 2014, a photographer tried to copyright a monkey's selfie and sue Wikipedia for it. (en.wikipedia.org)
The EFF soon created a crossword, overlaid it on top of the monkey, and featured it on their website....
TIL of a strange coincidence between an episode of Seinfeld and the OJ Simpson muders. (www.imdb.com)
Senfeld S5E9: Because Elaine is dating a man with the same name as New York serial killer Joel Rifkin, she wants him to change his name to a less embarrassing one and suggests O.J.; about six months after this episode aired, O.J. Simpson was arrested and charged with the murder of his ex-wife and her friend.
TIL about Eugene Debs, a 1920 Socialist candidate who ran for President while jailed in Federal prison for sedition, receiving 3.4% of the vote at the time. He promised to pardon himself if elected. (en.wikipedia.org)
Eugene Debs, a Socialist leader in the early 20th century, ran for President five times. His fifth and highest vote count came in the 1920 Presidential election, in which he was running while in Federal prison for sedition. He received about 3.4% of the vote at the time (which included women for the first time since the...
