Post * B4NW — Curious Curator

› added 10 years ago

193

TIL that a team at MIT invented a camera that can capture 1 trillion frames per second, enough to see light travel in slow motion.

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Br0LW TIL Kazakh author Rollan Seisenbayev wrote a novel about the human-engineered collapse of the Aral Sea, first published in in the final years of the Soviet Union. The Aral's shrinkage left seaside villages and beached shipping vessels far from the shoreline, destroying the fisheries

8Q4P TIL that in a competition to build the world’s tallest building, the architect of the Chrysler Building secretly built it with a 125 ft long spire inside of it. When his competitor’s building was completed, the spire was pushed up through the building making it taller by 119 ft

jNWVp TIL of Georgy Malenkov. Though he led the Soviet Union after Stalin's death, he eventually lost an internal power struggle with Khrushchev. He was demoted to be a manager of a hydroelectric plant in Kazakhstan and lived out the rest of his life in utter obscurity

4XAnX TIL that goosebumps are a vestigial reflex (a reflex that has lost its function / purpose through evolution), which would raise the hair of humans to both trap body heat and scare off predators by appearing larger than usual. It is due to this that we get goosebumps when cold or scared.

VM7Rk TIL in 1857 Charles Lockock, believing there to be a cause-effect relationship between masturbation and seizures, began to treat his patients with potassium bromide which was known to reduce sex drive. In doing so, he serendipitously discovered what would become the first drug therapy for epilepsy.