Funori, a type of red seaweed, can be used in a solution to clean paper artefacts and to consolidate torn paper or flaking paint. (If nothing else, scroll down through this paper to see the before and after pictures; it's very effective.) It was also used in fixing chalk a chalkboard (the professor the chalkboard belonged to won the Nobel prize, and his campus was storing it as part of his legacy.)
I welcome our octopus overlords (joke aside, that option is fucking fascinating and would indicate an incredibly advanced mental progress even for a species that's already known to be wicked smart)
and thats from 2015, what have the octos been up to in the meantime... unrelated Today I Learned: Spoiler: Menstrual grosssness someone mentioned "uterine casts" and i was like what... is that... google tells me its when the uterus just yeets the whole lining out at once. In one piece usually. So you basically get a spooky looking uterus shaped blorp of tissue. wow grody!
My phone translates multiple languages! This Chinese lady and I at the shuttle stop were totally having a conversation by typing things into our translator apps.
I already knew Vikings didn't wear horned helmets, but TIL that the Celts and pre-Viking era Scandinavians did.
TIL that one of the reasons that birds lay eggs is that their core body temperature is much higher than that of mammals - 40°C would literally cook any fetus that tried to incubate internally.
FUN FACT, I have a longtime friend who wrote WWE fanfiction as a teenager. I never read any of it, but yeah, I actually know someone who’s written it!
When your credit card company places a hold on your card, for instance because they're concerned it might've been compromised, the message you get from the front-end isn't "there's a hold on this, please contact your bank". The message you get from the front-end is "THIS CARD IS MASSIVELY OVERDRAWN, THERE IS NO MONEY HERE, GO AWAY". On a related note, my credit card company is very attentive to my normal spending habits and isn't afraid of putting holds on my card if they see something that's massively out of the norm for me. Which is nice to know, really.
Unfortunately my credit card company isn't very good at noticing my normal spending habits, because they're not typical to my demographics at all, and this front-end message has caused a lot of trouble with me and a few Japanese businesses. D:
Today I learned that discrimination against Appalachians was significant enough in some areas of the US that "Appalachian regional origin" had to be specifically included in anti-discrimination laws in a few cities
In Japan, Kit-Kats are SUPER popular, which I already knew. What I DIDN’T know is that part of their popularity is that “kitto katsu” is a Japanese phrase meaning, roughly, “you’re sure to win”—a term of encouragement! (It’s common for students to give them to their friends during exams as a way to wish them good luck.)
YUP one of the few gluten items I genuinely miss eating are white chocolate and matcha kitkats I used to buy them by the box and keep them in my freezer. Japan has amazing kitkat flavours. I'm kinda bummed that I never managed to eat a sakura kitkat before I found out that they're full of poison (for me).
