› added 9 years ago

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TIL during the early penicillin era, the drug was so scarce and so highly valued that it became common to collect the urine from patients being treated, so that the penicillin in the urine could be isolated and reused

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nWXxo TIL the BIPM doesn't use a physical rod that's exactly 1 metre similar to the physical "Kilogram" specimen, instead use concise measurement of light & time defined in 1984 by the CGPM as the distance light travels, in a vacuum, in 1/299,792,458 secs with time measured by a cesium-133 atomic clock.
mxAEY TIL of the land of brushes. Kumano city in Japan's Hiroshima prefecture is famous for producing handmade brushes that are used by Hollywood makeup artists among others. But it only specialized in brushmaking after farmers had to sell brushes to earn an income during the agricultural off season.
Rdb8 TIL: In January 2012, 150 employees of Foxconn, Taiwanese technology company and contract manufacturer for products including the iPhone, iPad and Playstation 4, threatened to commit mass suicide in protest of their working conditions
j64wn TIL about the gyro monorail a form of rail transport that ran on only 1 set of wheels and ran on a single line of railway track.It stayed upright using a gyroscope and could even bank on turns. It never made it past the prototype stage due to the costs of needing a gyroscope in every car in a train.
gjyW TIL there is no upper age limit for Peace Corps volunteers and there are about 500 volunteers over age 50 (7% of their volunteers)