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TIL: In an effort to fight oil well fires, Hungarian engineers recycled a Russian T-34 tank, and replaced the gun turret with two Mig-21 jet engines. The team would inject water into the exhaust of the engines and literally blow an oil well fire out. They called the device Big Wind.

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dAkE TIL when cats are stalking their prey, they “chatter” their teeth because they are so intensely fixated on their prey that they are envisioning biting on them already. This is called: the “vacuum reaction”
oBP4E TIL that in the 9th century Chinese alchemists in search of the elixir of life created a mixture of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal. Ironically, short of a path to immortality, they had discovered gunpowder.
eLw5 TIL In 2004, the Parisian police in an uncharted area of the Paris Catacombs, found a secret room with a stocked bar and restaurant. They returned to trace the installed power and phone lines to discover they had been cut, with a note left behind reading, “Do not try and find us.”
wLPk8 TIL Mara Wilson was very sad because her mother died of cancer and couldn't see Matilda's movie. After that, Danny DeVito had told Mara that he brought an early version of the film to the hospital where her mother was while she was badly sick, so her mother saw her performance before she died.
EJjw TIL Engineers are three to four times more likely to become violent terrorists than their peers in finance, medicine or the sciences. The next most radicalizing graduate degree, in a distant second, was Islamic Studies.