› added 6 months ago

35

TIL about the Lost Apple Project, a nonprofit organization that searches abandoned farms in the Pacific Northwest to locate old apple varieties that have been thought to be lost or extinct. There were approximately 17k varieties of apples in the US, but only about 4.5k are known to exist today

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

LQbWQ TIL: why Election Day in the US is on a Tuesday: so farmers could get to the polls and still have time to get their crops to market.
pYBJZ TIL that spent fuel from nuclear reactors is used to make household fire alarms
nePyo TIL that laid end to end, an adult’s blood vessels could circle Earth’s equator four times!
Lk5ov TIL Dr. Seuss drew anti-Japanese cartoons during WWII. When he met the survivors of Hiroshima, he realized "A person is a person no matter how small". He later created Horton Hears a Who! as an apology, dedicating it to a Japanese friend.
7XQL TIL: Treadmills used to be used as punishment for prisoners in the 1800’s. The treadmills powered grain mills (hence the name treadmill) and pump water.