› added 5 years ago

57

TIL Bill gates purchased the Leonardo da Vinci's Codex for $30,802,500. Three years later he had its pages scanned into digital image files, some of which were later distributed as screen saver and wallpaper files on a CD-ROM as part of a Microsoft Plus! for Windows so everyone could enjoy them.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

4Xn4J TIL that during the filming of Planet Earth II, the filmmakers went out of their way to save the lost baby turtles despite the convention that, as Sir David Attenborough said, "If you’re a film cameraman you are trained, as it were, to be the observer, a non-participant"
9YD7 TIL That Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left one of Yuri Gagarin’s cosmonaut medals on the moon to pay tribute to his accomplishment as the world’s first man in space
xVxbB TIL “Black Forest Ham” comes from the Black Forest region of Germany, where it was originally coated with beef blood to give it its dark color.
wLKYY Werner de Gier, a biology student at Leiden University, and shrimp expert Charles Fransen were faced with the prospect of naming a newly discovered shrimp with hairy legs. They did what any self-respecting scientists would do and named it after Bilbo Baggins, the hairy-footed hobbit from The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings series.
Ly80 TIL: The common spiral depiction of the Milky Way Galaxy used in media is actually another galaxy:Messier 74. Because we dwell within the Milky Way Galaxy, it is impossible for us to take a picture of its spiral structure from the outside.