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TIL - Most of the smoke billowing up from a space shuttle launch is not exhaust. It is water vapor from the pool of water under the shuttle designed to absorb the acoustic shock waves that could otherwise tear the shuttle apart.

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DQDjj TIL The rarest eye color is green, as only about 2 percent of the world’s population sport this shade. About 10,000 years ago, all humans had brown eyes and over half the people in the world have them
8eQYb TIL the original script for Happy Feet framed it as a much darker PG-13 movie, with uses of "Shit", acknowledgement of penguins having high mortality rates from predation and starvation, anti-religion/tradition undertones, and an appearance of godlike alien penguins in the ending.
9w6v6 TIL of Aeschylus, an ancient Greek tragedian, who was killed after an eagle carrying a tortoise, mistook Aeschylus' bald head for a rock suitable for shattering the reptile's shell. Apparently, Aeschylus had been staying outdoors to avert a prophecy that he would be killed "by a falling object".
xo5b TIL In 1883, a writer attempted to make a Portuguese-to-English phrasebook - despite not knowing English himself. Popularized in America by Mark Twain, “English As She Is Spoke” is filled with such nonsensical English idioms as “to craunch the marmoset” and “to buy cat in pocket.”
5Vd1D TIL that Rube Goldberg never actually built a Rube Goldberg Machine, they were bi-weekly comic strips. It was other people who built his designs and other such machines.