› added 9 months ago

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TIL Car tires are major source of ocean microplastics and more than 200,000 tonnes of tiny plastic particles are blown from roads into the oceans every year

Read more theguardian.com

via reddit.com

1QPr TIL that in NYC in 2012, more Black babies were aborted than born
1o4X TIL The earliest form of RAM stored data as sound waves. Bits would be ‘thumped’ into a tube filled with mercury, then read by sensor on the other end. The computer was free to do other things during the relative eternity it took the bits moving at the speed of sound rather than the speed of light.
gM7Ny TIL of the USS Yorktown. A US navy ship that was left "dead in the water" after a member of the crew accidentally tried to divide by 0 on it's computers. This caused many of the ship's computer systems to crash, including propulsion resulting in it needing towing back to port.
E7Dx TIL If one of your grandparents are Irish, you could claim Irish citizenship no matter where you live or born without knowing anything about Ireland.
eP1n TIL that a popular 70s Japanese kids show called Rascal the Raccoon led to a raccoon adoption craze in Japan. Eventually, raccoons invaded the wild, where they continue to this day to wreak havoc on infrastructure and the environment as they have no natural predators.