› added 5 years ago

87

TIL Former US President George HW Bush was once head of the CIA

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

XKKQ TIL that a new radio telescope being built in Australia and South Africa will generate so much data about space that it will exceed global internet traffic by a large margin. An exabyte per day of raw data, which could be compressed to around 10 petabytes.
Brr0y TIL Root beer is flavored with the sassafras tree, and that the same plant is the source of safrole(the precursor for MDMA ecstacy).
9Y777 TIL about June Almeida, a Scottish virologist who pioneered virus imaging, identification and diagnosis; her work includes the first or early images of rubella, coronavirus and HIV.
9YYZ6 TIL that in 1914, four empires claimed to be successors to the Roman Empire; the German Empire, Russian Empire, Ottoman Empire and Italian Empire. All of them collapsed because of WW1 except for the Italian Empire, leaving them as the only empire to claim succession from the Roman Empire.
pYGnO TIL that the Windows 95 startup sound was originally composed on a Mac. The sound’s composer, Brian Eno, later admitted that he never used a PC in his life.