› added 5 years ago

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TIL between the 16th and 18th centuries, the Catholic church exhumed skeletons from catacombs and decorated them with gold and precious stones to serve as relics for saints. While some of the corpses may have been early martyrs, most actually did not belong to anybody with religious significance.

oXPK TIL that Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, the hosts for Mythbusters, never liked each other.
4XGd5 TIL that when Hurricane Ivan was in the Gulf of Mexico in 2004, pressure sensors on the ocean floor detected a freak wave 91 feet tall. Computer simulations suggested that at the storm's peak as a Category 5 it was producing waves over 130 feet high.
oRpkY TIL that US Navy sailors in World War II drank torpedo juice, a blend of 180-proof grain alcohol fuel from a torpedo and pineapple juice. Despite the Navy's attempts to render the alcohol undrinkable, sailors still found ways around this to varying degrees of effectiveness.
4XEVa TIL about the Oh-My-God Particle, a proton traveling at about 99.99999999999999999999951% the speed of light. It is the fastest moving object ever recorded and as it hit the atmosphere it carried the kinetic energy equivalent to a baseball traveling at 50MPH, all in one particle.
DQd8P TIL about "the yips", the sudden and unexplained loss of ability to perform certain actions in experienced athletes across many sports. For example, All-Star pitcher Jon Lester began struggling to field hit balls in 2014 so he would run most of the way to 1st base and underhand throw the ball.