› added 5 years ago

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Today I learned the phrase "mad as a hatter" or "madhatter" comes from old hat makers using mercury to shape animal pelts into top hats.

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mNWM TIL On October 23, 1999, BASE jumper and stuntwoman Jan Davis made a protest jump off El Capitan to lift Yosemite’s BASE jumping ban. She died in the process. The ban remains intact.
m1Lwo TIL The world record for the fastest flight speed of a manned airplane was set in 1967 when The North American X-15 reached a top speed of Mach 6.72 (4,520 mph or 7,274 km/h).
m1XdP TIL a Japanese cafe has robots that serve customers while being controlled by paralysed people, who get paid 1,000 yen (about $7.66) per hour for their work.
Z8eJv TIL In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore became the first non-European writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Highly prolific, Tagore was also a composer and wrote the national anthems for both India and Bangladesh and he started painting in his 60s
MeBZA TIL Nasa hires a chief sniffer to smell everything that sends to space...