› added 4 years ago

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TIL Physics Laureate Gerard Muorou (2018, Short Pulse Lasers) accidentally revolutionized Ophthalmology when in 1993 a student, struck by the laser, miraculously suffered no damage as the pulse was amazingly short, lasting a femtosecond long. The laser than became the Standard-Bearer in Eye Surgery.

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8eKYL TIL Ray Bradbury's story a sound of thunder predates the theory of the Butterfly Effect, but uses a butterfly to make the same example of chaos theory....
0dW81 TIL An engineer named Walter "Taffy" Holden accidentally took off in a military jet without knowing how to fly it
xVVGk Of all the bodies in our solar system, the sun is probably the one we want to give the widest berth. It gushes radiation, and even though its surface is the coolest part of the star, it burns at about 9,940°F, hot enough to incinerate just about any material. As such, there are no plans to send a manned mission in its direction anytime soon (Mars is much more interesting, anyway), but it can't hurt to figure out at what distance a person would want to turn back. You can get surprisingly close. The sun is about 93 million miles away from Earth, and if we think of that distance as a football field, a person starting at one end zone could get about 95 yards before burning up.
OokoR TIL New Mexico was NOT named after Mexico and was actually named before Mexico even existed as an independent country.
oDwL TIL that the first person to spot a flying saucer, didn’t himself describe its shape as a saucer. But said the objects moved erratically: “like a saucer if you skip it across the water”. And was misinterpreted by the media.