11.
TIL Crowing first at dawn is a privilege reserved for the highest ranking rooster.
12.
TIL Sony sold its waterproof Walkman in a bottle of water to prove it was really waterproof.
13.
TIL Salvador Dali once conned Yoko Ono into paying $10,000 for a single blade of grass. Yoko had offered to pay that amount for one of his mustache hairs. He substituted the blade of grass because he thought that Yoko Ono was a witch and might use his hair in a spell.
14.
TIL Bruce Lee was the winner of the 1958 Hong Kong Cha-Cha Dancing Championship. He kept a card with 108 different cha-cha dance steps in his wallet and developed new moves which he wrote down in a personal notebook labeled “Cha-Cha Fancy Steps.”
15.
TIL In the 1930’s a selling point for TP started by Northern Tissue company was that their toilet paper was “splinter free”
16.
TIL beavers build their dams as an instinct to stop the sounds of water leaks. If a speaker is playing just the sound of running water, a beaver will build a dam over it. This is even if it’s over concrete with no visible water, or if an actual nearby leaky water source is quieter than the speaker.
17.
TIL astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who as a student discovered pulsars, credits her discovery to impostor syndrome and a fear of being kicked out of college; “I’m a bit of a fighter, so I decided until they threw me out I would work my very hardest”. That discovery earned the 1974 Nobel Prize.
18.
TIL that when his father died of a heart attack, Ronald Mallett resolved to discover time travel to see him again. He went on to earn a PhD in physics and become a professor, and has been working on plans for a time machine ever since.
19.
TIL In 1908, the Russian shooting team arrived at the London Olympics twelve days late. The Russian team had made sure to arrive a few days before the event was scheduled, but Russia still used the Julian calendar. The UK had switched to the Gregorian calendar 150 years earlier
20.
TIL that hippo sweat contains a chemical that has an SPF factor to prevent them from getting sunburned.
