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According to a 2021 scientific paper, capybaras are significantly more comfortable when bathing in hot springs.
(Image: Masaki Tokutomi; CC BY-SA.)
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San Francisco allows residents to "adopt a drain" and name it.
Names include "Drains of Castamere", "Grate Expectations" and of course, "Drainy McDrainface".
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In 1938, the German army selected Werner Goldberg to appear on recruitment posters as "the ideal German soldier".
Two years later, he was discharged from the army because his father was Jewish.
(Both Goldberg and his father survived the Holocaust.)
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CUNNINGHAM'S LAW: The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it's to post the wrong answer. STEVEN MCGEADY
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Workers who only come into office on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are sometimes referred to as TWaTs.
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You used to be able to eat dinner inside a taxidermied blue whale. Now you can't, because of two people who should be very ashamed of themselves. 👀🐳
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In the United States, giving birth is 20 times more lethal than skydiving.
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A study has shown that birds that live in colder places have smaller beaks. McGill University’s blog published an article about the study with the headline ‘Peckers Get Smaller Where It Gets Colder’.
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The belief that ideas from the past are by default worse than ideas of the modern age is called chronological snobbery.
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Phrase of the Day: PRODUCTIVITY THEATRE — when your colleague behaves in a way that seems to suggest they work very hard while in fact this might not be the case.
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The red material dropped from planes fighting forest fires acts both as a flame retardant and fertiliser, to help new growth after the fire is extinguished.
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Open plan offices increase worker stress, blood pressure, and turnover.
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Word of the day: SORRY-GO-ROUND (19th century) - a depressing set of repetitive events
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Every year, Lake Superior University publishes a list of words and phrases they would like to banish the next year.
This year's entries include "moving forward", "does that make sense?" and "it is what it is".
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"I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes. Because if you are making mistakes, then... you're doing things you've never done before and more importantly, you're Doing Something." NEIL GAIMAN
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Light travels faster than sound. That's why some people seem bright until they speak. PHYLLIS DILLER
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Doing a Monty Python silly walk for only eleven minutes a day is as beneficial for your health as the recommended 75 minutes of vigorous physical activity a week. (Study: bit.ly/3jutecL; 📷: Jazeen Hollings.)
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Honeybees and humans are the only animals we know that can be taught the difference between even and odd numbers.
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This 1881 map shows how long it would take (in days) to get by train from London to other parts of the world.
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To make the war less visible and traumatising for the small children of Kyiv, a local concrete manufacturer and a children’s charity have turned some of the military roadblocks in the city into fairy-tale characters. (Images: childrenheroes.org/en/; h/t @VlOstrovskyi)
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Word of the Day: DIÀNZǏ ZHÀCÀI (Chinese, slang) — a non-demanding entertainment, for instance, a TV show to enjoy after a long day at work, a mental comfort food; literally ‘cyber pickle’.
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Germany has three times as many sausage varieties as the French have cheeses.
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"[Young people today] think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it." ARISTOTLE (4th century BCE)
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Julia Child was 6' 2" (188 cm) and so dominant at college basketball that the administration at her college banned her from dunking.
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The small village of Villar de Corneja, Spain celebrates the New Year at noon instead of midnight, as many of the residents are elderly and want to go to bed early.
@qikipedia
A Quite Interesting Twitter feed from the team behind the BBC TV show QI.
linktr.ee/TheQIElves