› added 5 years ago

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TIL that the White House placed buckets of wet sand around during WW1 as an early fire extinguisher

Read more library.whitehousehistory.org

via reddit.com

ZpDda TIL that scientists believe the earliest known ancestor of humans (and many others), Saccorhytus, was about a millimeter in size and lived between grains of sand on the ocean floor 540 million years ago. It also had a very large mouth, but surprisingly no anus
5Ykar Our brains keep us 15 seconds 'in the past' to help us see a stable world
VBAWm TIL that the US Coast Guard uses a captured Nazi German sailboat to train its cadets
x6Ea7 TIL a woman, Jackie Mitchell, struck out both Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, then had her contracted voided
OZg4 TIL there are more Subway restaurants in the U.S. than there are Starbucks and McDonald’s combined