TIL Alan Turing used to practice his Cambridge lectures in front of a stuffed bear he got in college named Porgy. He kept the bear with him throughout life.
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TIL Ghana and Ivory Coast produce at least 70 percent of the world's cocoa beans. And the world is running out of cocoa farmers as the next generation refuses to take up this job because of the difficulty of the process and wages as low as 84 cents a day.
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TIL about Boustrophedon - a style of writing in which alternate lines of writing are reversed, with letters also written in reverse, mirror-style.
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TIL of Margaret Cavendish, the first woman to be invited to attend a session of the Royal Society and one of the first writers of science fiction.
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TIL of an epic April Fool’s prank by BBC in 1957 - a 3 minute broadcast around a family in southern Switzerland harvesting spaghetti from a "spaghetti tree".
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TIL Tuberculosis is listed as the oldest contagious disease to affect humans by the Guinness World Records
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TIL Cayman Islands has more registered companies than its population.
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TIL about the candle auction - a method of auction where the end of the auction is signaled by the expiration of a candle flame, which was intended to ensure that no one could know exactly when the auction would end and make a last-second bid.
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TIL the motto of the Royal Society, one of the earliest scientific academies, founded in London in 1660, is ‘Nullius in verba’, which means something like ‘Take no one’s word for it.’
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TIL sea urchins can drill holes in solid rock with just their teeth.
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TIL Admiral Byrd is the only person to have three ticker-tape parades in New York City (in 1926, 1927, and 1930) given in his honor. He was the first person to fly over both the North and South Poles.
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TIL of the courtesy flag - a small national maritime flag of the host country, flown by ships when entering a nation's territorial waters for the first time.
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TIL of Washington Principles as per which governments agreed to encourage museums to conduct provenance research on their collections, identify art seized by the Nazis, and seek “just and fair solutions” with the original Jewish collectors and their heirs on stolen works
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TIL fingerprinting was first introduced in British India in 1900, developed by Bengali Police to collect prisoners’ fingerprints. The first UK fingerprint bureau was established in Scotland Yard in 1901.
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TIL the scent of Play-doh has been trademarked. Hasbro describes it as “sweet, slightly musky, vanilla fragrance, with slight overtones of cherry, combined with the smell of a salted, wheat-based dough.”
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TIL the uniform dark gray background color that many people report seeing in the absence of light is called Eigengrau or dark light or brain gray.
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TIL Japan railway platforms saw a 84 percent decrease in suicides at stations after they installed blue lights.
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TIL at the height of operations during the Berlin airlift, one plane reached West Berlin every thirty seconds. The C-47s and C-54s together flew over 92,000,000 miles (148,000,000 km) in the process, almost the distance from Earth to the Sun.
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TIL of Lise Meitner, a physicist who was nominated 19 times for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry between 1924 and 1948, and 30 times for the Nobel Prize in Physics between 1937 and 1967. She was never awarded the Nobel Prize and was instrumental in the discoveries of nuclear fission.
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TIL the Notre Dame fire disaster was made worse because a guard was sent to investigate, but to the wrong location where he found no fire. The alarm system was not designed to automatically notify the fire brigade
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TIL in more than a hundred Brazilian telenovelas broadcast from the 1970s to the 1990s, 72 percent of the main female characters younger than 50 years old had no children. Brazilian telenovelas were responsible for an average 11 percent drop in fertility among women over 35.
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TIL Neil Diamond was a member of the 1960 NCAA men's championship fencing team.
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TIL Colombia grows 80% of the roses sold in the US, along with many other kinds of flowers for export.The country is now the world’s second largest exporter of flowers, and the industry, which employs about 130,000 Colombians, is the leading source of jobs for women in Colombia.
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TIL during the siege of Leningrad, scientists working at the world’s largest collection of seeds protected the seeds from the threats of the cold, the hungry residents of the besieged city, rats, and their own hunger. Twenty-eight of the botanists died during the siege, protecting their collection.
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TIL although the idea that Adam and Eve ate an apple is common, the Book of Genesis never mentions the identity of the forbidden fruit.
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