TIL Bill Nye originally got his break into the Entertainment industry after 4 times of being rejected to join NASA's astronaut training program in the late 70's, and stumbled into a new career path by winning a Steve Martin look-alike contest in 1978 that launched his career into stardom. https://ift.tt/2E4fcXt

TIL that white mushrooms, cremini mushrooms, and portobello mushrooms are all the same mushroom but at different stages of growth. https://ift.tt/36uYOLx

TIL the Honeycrisp apple was thrown away by the University of Minnesota research team and rescued from a trash pile by one of the researchers. https://ift.tt/2LLr58T

TIL The bezel on a dive watch only turns counterclockwise so that if the bezel is bumped accidentally during a dive it will only move in one direction, subtracting time from the dive and prompting the diver to surface early rather than staying under for too long. https://ift.tt/38wZXEa

TIL Tsar Nicholas II kissed thousands of soldiers during his reign. It was an Easter tradition for him to personally kiss each one of the thousands of soldiers of his Cossack bodyguard on the cheek. This took two to four days. https://ift.tt/2skkhIk

TIL: Ireland has 0.0006% of the worlds population but supplies 37.8% of global blood exports. This is due to a higher than average amount O blood types. https://ift.tt/34e7t3J

TIL Scotts Miracle-Gro helped create a type of grass that's resistant to weed killer. It escaped its lab and spread across Oregon, becoming an unwanted weed with no easy way to kill it. https://ift.tt/2LLXNH7

TIL that Dan Aykroyd's family have been in the ghost business for generations, his great grandfather actually tried to contact spirits and his father wrote a book called "The History of Ghosts" https://ift.tt/2LMrtnu

TIL the success of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution has been attributed in part to soccer hooligans, whose experience in street brawling and resisting police was useful in protecting the mass demonstrations in Tahrir Square from being cleared out by police. https://ift.tt/2PBHE8l

TIL about Ralph Lazo, a Mexican-American who voluntarily relocated to a World War II Japanese American internment camp (Manzanar) to join his Japanese-American friends and neighbors. He was the only known non-spouse, non-Japanese American at Manzanar, where he lived for 2.5 years. https://ift.tt/2tboUoL

TIL sex traffickers have been known to implant their victims with RFID chips similar to the RFID chips implanted in pets that help identify pets if they are lost. https://ift.tt/349mW4V

TIL because of the vastness of the deep ocean, when a male and female anglerfish mate their bodies fuse into one. The male's now useless body parts like eyes and fins wither away. He spends the rest of his life attached to her like a parasite, taking food and providing her with babies. https://ift.tt/2RK1L7a

TIL Archaeologists found 2,800 year old ceramic sippy cups with cute animal motifs, containing traces of livestock milk, which suggests infants back then were drinking it. The dates correspond to a baby boom at that time, suggesting that sippy cups were an important innovation for humanity. https://ift.tt/38v3vXN

TIL Everybody Draw Mohammed Day (or Draw Mohammed Day) was a 2010 event in support of artists threatened with violence for drawing representations of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. It stemmed from a protest against censorship of the American television show South Park episode "201", led by the show'. https://ift.tt/2Ecfb3L

TIL about Piaget’s theory of development. He believed infants in the early stages of development lack object permanence (the understanding that people and things still exist even when you can’t see them). Which would explain why peekaboo is so intriguing for them! https://ift.tt/2t5wrVT

TIL - Switzerland is mostly Lutheran because Lutheran priests allowed the population to eat sausages during fasting period https://ift.tt/2LKKV42

TIL American soldiers in the Pacific theater of WW2 always used passwords containing the letter 'L' due to Japanese mispronunciation, a word such as lollapalooza would be used and upon hearing the first two syllables come back as 'rorra' would "open fire without waiting to hear the rest". https://ift.tt/2tdJRQ1

TIL that the Sony PlayStation was never meant to be a product. It was intended to be a new console that would play exclusively Nintendo games on CDs. Instead Nintendo backed out of the deal at the last minute. Sony went ahead and launched what would become the most successful console of all time. https://ift.tt/2RGGknr

TIL that there are prostitute penguins who exchange sexual favours for stones. https://ift.tt/35jcPfi

TIL in April of 1997, the internet faced a blackout due to a single bad router in Florida. The bug spread like a plague across the world, crashing networks everywhere. https://ift.tt/2skfLcW

TIL of Sogen Kato, believed to be the oldest man in Tokyo at the age of 111 until it was discovered he died at 79 and the family lied about it to keep receiving his pension https://ift.tt/2RM8Jsi