› added 7 years ago

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TIL that all mammals, from mice to whales, have roughly the same number of heartbeats in a lifetime: 1 billion.

Read more ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

via reddit.com

gMklD TIL Frank Sinatra died the night of Seinfeld's finale and his ambulance made it to the hospital in record time because traffic was so light due to everyone watching the show.
5VMyB TIL North American arts and crafts store Michaels has seen a 300 per cent sales boost in its beads and jewelry categories to make Friendship bracelets in the days leading up to Taylor Swift concerts. Globally, only 9% of plastic waste is recycled, 50% ends up in landfills
QNDr6 TIL that when a volcanic eruption started a few hundred meters from the main settlement of the island of Heimaey, a stroke of luck in the form of a storm during the prior days meant that almost the entire fishing fleet was in the harbor which aided in the speedy evacuation of the 5,300 inhabitants.
M5Dm TIL Spielberg suggested Ron Howard (the director of Apollo 13) to use KC-135 - an airplane that could create 23 seconds of weightlessness for filming certain scenes. Those scenes were filmed in bursts of 25 seconds after flying 612 parabolas, adding up to a total of 3hrs 54mins of weightlessness.
oBOZR TIL of Operation Bloodstone, a CIA project to recruit former Nazis and collaborators to conduct "psychological warfare, subversion, sabotage, [...] assassination, target capture and rescue". Many hired agents were high ranking Nazis, some of which had committed crimes against humanity.