› added 3 years ago

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TIL that Kalpana Chawla, one of the astronauts killed in the Columbia tragedy, knew Steve Morse of Deep Purple and had even taken the band’s “Machine Head” album to space with her on the mission. Morse wrote a song called “Contact Lost” as a tribute to her.

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JY65k TIL Post-it Notes were created by accident when a chemist tried to create a super-strong glue but ended up with a super-weak one. Even the now iconic yellow colour was an accident as it was the only one available in the next-door lab.
e0oW4 TIL after ZZ Top's exhausting first major tour, the band went on a long hiatus to recover. When the band finally reconvened after two years of relaxing and decompressing, the two guitarists discovered they had both separately let themselves go and grown long thick beards.
PbAw TIL standard evasive procedure for a surface-to-air-missile being directed at a SR-71 Blackbird, was for the plane to simply accelerate and outfly the missile.
7XAp TIL of Princess Angela of Liechtenstein, the first person of known African origin to marry into a reigning European dynasty
W71xd TIL that excess human food is harmful to wildlife. So we can't just dump all the leftovers into a forest or something and let them do whatever with it, choosing landfills and even poisoning supermarket dumpsters instead...