› added 1 year ago

120

TIL the National Covid Memorial Wall is a 500 meter wall created in 2020 along the Thames in London to mark the lives lost to Covid in the U.K. It has more than 240,000 individually hand-painted red hearts, each representing a victim. Many hearts have messages left by the bereaved or by volunteers.

Read more nationalcovidmemorialwall.org

via reddit.com

5YdeD TIL That the name Pluto was suggested by Venetia Burney, an 11-year old school girl in England. She was interested in ancient mythology and thought that Hades, the Greek god of the underworld, made a good name. She suggested Pluto, to match the Roman god names given to the other planets.
rR9M4 TIL Pure water, a fluid of strictly H2O, is an excellent insulator and will not conduct electricity due to its neutral particles. Only the introduction of impurities like trace metals with negatively or positively charged particles makes water an excellent, if not deadly, conductor of electricity.
oBrBE TIL one of the reasons the Chinese never fully developed gunpowder weaponry was because their walls could sustain artillery bombardments. Even 20th century artillery guns had trouble piercing their walls.
9Y5rQ TIL Suriname is a country in South America that uses Dutch as a majority language. Sranan Tongo is a creole language also spoken there, made of English, Dutch, Portuguese, and West African languages. Population includes Natives, Dutch, Indonesian, Indian, Chinese, and runaway slaves (Maroons).
R7Qo6 TIL: The decline in hunters threatens how U.S. pays for conservation. The user-play, user-pay funding system for wildlife conservation has been emulated around the world. It has been incredibly successful at restoring the populations of North American game animals, some of which were once endangered