Spoiler: TIL too much about kangaroo testes In most mammals, the penis is for both urination and ejaculation. In kangaroos (and other marsupials), the penis is solely for ejaculation; they urinate and defecate through a cloaca. This means that the testes can't go between the urethra and the anus. Instead, they're actually in front of the penis. Also they can be voluntarily retracted.
Til people harvest spider silk by genetically modifying goats into SPIDER GOATS (which only means they produce web in their milk, sadly) and refine the milk into web Edit: also the best sounding violin strings possible are made of spider silk
TIL that dog dwarfism (corgis, basset hounds, dachsunds, a bunch of other breeds) is the result of a retrovirus inserting an extra copy of a bone development gene somewhere in the genome, and there was probably just one event that's been kicking this mutation around the dog gene pool ever since and every dwarf dog breed that was developed independently all over the world was people basically rediscovering it.
It pretty much had to be, because it was in there with no introns on a different chromosome from the original copy. Retroviruses: Downsides: AIDS. Upsides: Corgis?
TIL that in Hebrew, "dog" is pronounced "kehlev". At the same time, I learned that one of my friends is an even bigger nerd than I thought, and has had a stealth pun in his name the entire time I have known him. (Also, Deresto - it doesn't say so in the Wikipedia article, but if I remember right, Van Halen is not just really well known for their "bowl full of M&Ms with no brown ones" rider, but is also the first band to have started putting in a Weirdly Demanding rider as a test to check how carefully the rest of the requirements were being paid attention to. The article does explain why they had the rider in there, though (they were one of the first bands to use really heavy equipment and a lot of technical effects, and failure to do proper safety checks on a previous show had nearly gotten a band member killed).)
Yeah. I think Robin Williams had a thing requiring places to hire some homeless people to do stuff. And the Rolling Stones had one requiring a bowl of M&Ms with no brown M&Ms, not because it was in and of itself that big a deal, but because it was a super easy way to determine whether anyone had actually read the fucking thing. EDIT: Van Halen, apparently.
TIL that there are standards for which parts of a word you're allowed to break up and where you put the hyphen if you have to split a word in two for formatting on a page. I no-sarcasm love the MLA.
