› added 9 years ago

85

TIL in Bram Stokers original novel, Dracula is not killed by sunlight. He just becomes weaker.

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OooVL TIL Uranus has a magnetic field that "flickers" because the magnetic field is so off-kilter with its rotational axis that magnetic lines will snap apart and reconnect as it rotates. According to one astronomer, "Uranus is a geometric mess."
wLDDW TIL Princess Alexandra of Bavaria believed she had swallowed a glass piano as a child. This delusion was not unheard of and was recorded in Europe and mainly suffered by royals, nobels and scholars (between C15 and C17). It was manifest as a fear that parts of their anatomy were made of glass.
X07PE TIL that in order to obtain silk the silk worm is boiled or gassed inside their cocoons. 6,600 cocoons equaling 1 kilo of silk.
R7XYl TIL The stinging cells of Jellyfish are only around 2 micrometers in size. But can deploy in 0.7 microseconds and generate 7 GPa of penetration at a velocity of 15 m/s. Enough to pierce the shell of a crustacean.
PYoAE TIL: In a room at Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond all sound from the outside world is locked out. It's called an "anechoic" chamber, because it creates no echo at all. The background noise is so low that it approaches the lowest threshold theorized by mathematicians - next step is vacuum.