Y7WLW TIL the hottest place in the universe is on Earth. In a lab, scientists created plasma with temperatures of 5 trillion degrees Celsius, hotter than the center of the sun.
BgmQb TIL an Australian bartender exploited an ATM glitch and went on a $1.6 million spending spree over 4.5 months before getting caught!
rNpa0 TIL to help finance the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, producers secured funding from Led Zeppelin, Elton John, and Pink Floyd. The British comedy was first released 50 years ago this week, in April 1975.
NXmP8 TIL in 1945 a B-25 bomber crashed into the Empire State Building between the 78th & 80th floors, which killed 14 people and injured 26 others. Although on a normal workday, as many as 15,000 people worked in the skyscraper, but the crash happened to occur on a Saturday with only 1,500 present.
l7aJG TIL beaver dams saved a wetland in the Czech Republic. The government was planning to do the same thing, but the bureaucracy took too long. The dams saved $1.2 million.
8emwL TIL in only two seasons in Oakland, the American Basketball Association Oakland Oaks won 28% of their games the first year and 77% in their second, including the 1969 ABA Championship. The main difference was Rick Barry, who joined for one year after a salary dispute with the NBA’s Warriors.
P1mPJ TIL: Jacques Cousteau's Calypso had a 1000 litre stainless steel wine tank.
VB4Am TIL in 1961, astronomer Frank Drake created the Drake Equation, a formula to estimate the number of communicative alien civilizations in our galaxy, sparking the modern search for extraterrestrial life.
epr6E TIL about Giuseppe Garibaldi II, the Australian-born grandson of the Italian unifier who also fought in the Mexican Revolution and served under Pancho Villa.
X09AP TIL about the Smooth-Hawley tariff act of 1930 which increased US tariffs (by an average of 20%) on over 20,000 imported goods, while it seemed succesful at first by 1933 US exports had declined by 61% and its GNP by almost 50%
OGbP4 TIL about the last Kauai ōʻō bird in world and its last song. It was last recorded in 1987, singing to a mate that would never come, and has since been declared extinct.
69pW8 TIL that Sam Houston is the only person to have served as the governor of 2 U.S. states, with him serving as the 6th governor of Tennessee from 1827-1829, and as the 7th governor of Texas from 1859-1861.