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There’s a 21-foot, 50-year-old, 2370-lb crocodile in the Philippines.

A group of 100 hunters caught the giant croc, whose name is Lolong, last weekend. It was caught alive and there are plans to use it as a tourist attraction at an ecotourist park, though currently, wildlife officials say that Lolong has refused to eat in days.

The hunters were looking for the croc after a farmer was killed in a crocodile attack. Lolong is suspected of killing both the farmer and a girl who was killed in 2009. However, some villagers say that the killings may have been caused by a different, even bigger, crocodile that has been spotted. Inspections of Lolong’s stomach found no human remains.
Read more about Lolong, the giant crocodile, at ABC News, Business Insider, and Slate.

Caterpillars have more than twice as many muscles as humans do.

Some species of caterpillar have 4,000 muscles in their body. Compare that to the human muscular system, which is made up of only 639. It’s not unusual for insects to have more muscles than humans; grasshoppers have about 900.

Still, why do caterpillars have so many more muscles? It’s for a unique form of transportation. Caterpillars use all of their muscles to move, but not in the same way that we do. They contract their body muscles, forcing their internal organs forward. When caterpillars move forward, their guts move first, and then their bodies follow. No other animal is known to move like this.
(Sources: 1, 2)

12-century French monks invented tennis.

This was the earliest precursor to tennis. The monks played the game indoors without any rackets. They only used their hands! It was originally called “jeu de paume”. The game eventually caught on among French nobility, and of course, they added rackets.

The name “tennis” comes from the French word “Tenez”, which was said before a serve. The rest of tennis terminology comes from French as well; a lob is “un lob”, a fault is “une faute”, a break is “un break”, a volley is “une volleé”, etc.

Tennis eventually evolved to the outdoor sport we know today. The technical term for the outdoor sport is “Lawn Tennis”, as opposed to the game the monks invented, which we call “Real Tennis”.

More about tennis from LIVESTRONG and the New York Times.

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A rare genetic mutation causes people to have no fingerprints.

The condition that causes babies to be born without fingerprints, known as adermatoglyphia, has only appeared in four families in the world. One of those families agreed to partake in scientific research about the condition. In that family 9 of 16 people had no fingerprints. The researchers were able to isolate the gene that had the relevant mutation, SMARCAD1.

This mutation has been labeled as “immigration-delay disease” because the lack of fingerprints makes it hard to cross borders. Other than the lack of fingerprints and less sweating, immigration-delay disease doesn’t have any other side-effects.
(source)

You spend 40 minutes every day blind.

It's not that your eyes aren't working. Your mind is actually blocking images all the time, and refusing to process them. Whenever your eyes move, your brain doesn't process what would normally be very dizzying blurry images coming from the retina. To fill in the gaps of time, your brain creates an illusion for a fraction of a second to keep us from noticing. This is called "Saccadic masking" and it keeps us from experiencing motion blur.

Your brain replaces the blurry images with static images of your next object of focus. Whatever you look at after moving your eyes appears to stay still for a long period of time, because it is actually the same image stretched for a longer period of time to cover up the blur. This is called the "stopped-clock illusion", when the first second on a clock after you turn to look at it appears to take longer than all the other seconds.

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