› added 11 years ago

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TIL ‘Water Residence Time’ is how much time it would take to fill up a lake again if all of its water were suddenly removed. The lake with the longest water residence time is Lake Tanganyika in Africa at 5,500 years.

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8aakL TIL in 1996 an instrument failure caused a plane to lose control and crash just after takeoff, killing 189 people. It was later determined that the device used to measure airspeed was blocked by a wasp nest
P1bDG TIL that we don't actually know who the first person to reach the North Pole was. Robert Peary, Frederick Cook, and Richard Byrd all said they were the first people to reach it, but none of their claims are confirmed.
mxlQx TIL that in 1999 the World Bank had public water systems in two of Bolivia’s largest urban areas turned over to a Corporation in a secretive process - who raised water rates by up to 200%. The corporation was forced to leave Bolivia, but then spent 3 years trying to sue Bolivia for lost profits.
1D17 TIL that there are 14 people in the world with ‘keys’ to internet worldwide security ( 7 primary keepers, 7 back-up). They serve as a last-resort measure to reconstruct the system if something calamitous were to happen to the internet.
WJD9 TIL a high school student was sucked out of an airplane after it was struck by lightning. She fell 3.2 kilometers to the ground still strapped to her chair and lived. Only to endure a 9 day walk to the nearest civilzation, she was the only survivor.