› added 10 years ago

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TIL that Facebook has an “empathy team” to help its engineers and designers relate to the concerns of actual human beings.

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nemMG TIL Harper Lee and Truman Capote were childhood friends who wrote together after school. To Kill a Mockingbird’s character Dill is based on Capote. Lee was an “assistant researchist” for Capote to help write his book In Cold Blood. Both of them spent two months conducting interviews for the book.
oBQBY TIL in 1996, NASA established the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics program in order to research propulsion that requires no propellant mass. Topics of interest include experiments and theories regarding gravity and electromagnetism, vacuum energy, warp drives and worm-holes and quantum effects.
NA8M TIL most modern handheld devices like iPhones contain a mineral called “coltan” that is being produced as a commodity by slaves exploited by rebel armies in the Congo.
6ENkm TIL Irish monks invented spacing between written words.
p8d8A TIL that Turkey Vultures have been & sometimes are still used to detect natural gas leaks from pipelines; the odor that gas companies add to gas (so we can detect it since it's odorless) is the same as rotting flesh, which leads the vultures to congregate in the sky in the area of the leak.