› added 12 years ago

482

TIL that after 1812, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson spent “the rest of their lives writing fascinating letters to each other.”

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rNL60 TIL English has 14-21 vowel sounds (depending on dialect), far more than the 5-6 of an average language like Spanish, Hindi, Telugu, Arabic, or Mandarin. This is why foreign speakers often struggle with getting English vowels right.
NkoE TIL a Swedish scientist conducted the first study of the global greenhouse effect in 1896 by using infrared measurements of the atmosphere
VBXx8 TIL The bones of the fallen soldiers at Waterloo were exhumed from mass graves, ground down into bone-meal and used in the production of sugar at nearby sugar manufacturing plants. Also bones of the fallen were commonly ground into bone-meal and used as fertilizer.
Bmkx TIL That when Jim Carrey starred as the Grinch, it took 9 hours to to apply all the makeup required for the part, which drove Jim to the point of quitting the movie and he had to talk to the CIA about resisting torture.
ZK1v TIL there’s a DNA test that can identify a criminal’s race, but police refuse to use it