› added 7 years ago

848

TIL the ancient Babylonians worked out that there are solar eclipses that occur 18 years, 11 days, and 8 hours apart. This period, 223 lunar cycles, is called the Saros cycle. The 1999 eclipse and this year’s eclipse are Saros cycle solar eclipses.

Read more eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov

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Nb0J TIL Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s interest in spiritualism cost him a friendship with Harry Houdini. When Houdini showed Doyle that he could reproduce the so-called mystic powers of mediums, Doyle was unconvinced, and instead, believed that Houdini himself was a psychic.
j6eRa TIL The precursor to 'the rack' torture device was the Hippocratic bench, a medical device used to straighten the spine/set bones.
mxALP TIL Francis Crick who won the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA was under the influence of LSD when he first made the discovery.
GYaM7 TIL the inability to recognise faces is called Prosopagnosia (face blindness).
b91EN TIL Incest is illegal in Italy only if it provokes public scandal