› added 11 months ago

80

TIL Death Valley, the lowest elevation in the USA, continues to sink lower due to geologic activity

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Y7nnd TIL: The first air conditioner was used not for personal comfort but to remedy high humidity that interfered with the printing process
dDaW7 TIL breeder reactors are nuclear reactors that generate more fissile material than they consume
X0prk TIL in 1973, a Harvard astrophysicist suggested that we won't discover more advanced civilizations because they don't want us to find them and have the technology to ensure we never do. They have also set aside our planet as a zoo wherein they can observe us. He coined this idea the Zoo Hypothesis.
p8d5e TIL Indian Maharaja Jam Sahib adopted 640 Polish orphans during WWII. He brought the children to the royal palace in Bombay, had a dormitory built for them, and brought in Polish teachers and chefs so the children would feel at home and "recover their health and forget the ordeal they went through".
MeYNb TIL the tapeworm diet started with women in the Victorian Era. The style was to have pale skin, eyes that looked dilated, red cheeks and lips, and a tiny waist. In the age of corsets, they also ingested tapeworms to lose weight. Still practiced today, women take a pill that has a tapeworm egg inside