› added 4 years ago

142

TIL why you paid more for your hard disk in 2012: after Saudi Arabian oil company Saudi Aramco was hit by targeted malware W32.DistTrack.Shamoon, its owners sent out the company's private airplane fleet abroad to purchase every available hard drive, causing their global shortage and price increase.

Read more money.cnn.com

via reddit.com

VBnOQ TIL: That 4/20 is also National Pineapple Upside-down Cake Day.
mxPgR TIL that Wilson Greatbatch invented the implantable pacemaker – but he didn’t mean to. He was attempting to build a device that recorded heart rhythms, but after he misassembled the contraption, he noticed that it was giving off a heartbeat-like pulse. The pacemaker went on to save millions of lives
QRWM TIL Bill Gates once quoted “ “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”
JYMvl TIL That There Were Men Castrated in Childhood to Keep Their Prepubescent Voices: "Castrato". Apparently it was because women weren't allowed to sing in the church at the time, so this was their solution to still achieve "women'-like sounds"
QJNrp In September 2015, scientists witnessed something never seen before: two black holes colliding. Both about 30 times as big as our Sun, they had been orbiting each other for millions of years. A fraction of a second before the crash, they sent a vibration across the universe at the speed of light that was picked up by the LIGO detector. So what are these ripples in space? Amber L. Stuver explains. Lesson by Amber L. Stuver, directed by Eoin Duffy.