› added 8 years ago

142

TIL that when famed jeweler Harry Winston donated the 45 carat Hope Diamond, valued at $200 to $250 million USD, to the Smithsonian, he simply shipped it via the US Postal Service in a box wrapped in brown paper.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

BQYL TIL The price of a single bottle of Coca-Cola remained mostly unchanged from 1886 to 1959.
698XY TIL there's a man-made borehole that drains 100 million gallons of polluted coal mine runoff every day into the Lackawanna River and Chesapeake Bay.
a8ORb TIL in 1979 researcher John Merritt placed a photographic memory test in publications across the US. He estimated that roughly 1 million people took the test & of that number, 30 wrote in with the correct answer. However, when he visited 15 of them in their homes, not one could duplicate the feat.
R7mP1 TIL One to three days after getting a bad sunburn, you can experience a traumatic pain called "Hell's Itch" which feels like fire ants crawling under your skin.
V5bk TIL Full-screen games monopolize the graphics card, so alt-tabbing requires the game to give that control up and the OS to take it back and start rendering the desktop again.