› added 7 years ago

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TIL Kathryn Bigelow is the first and only female to win the Academy Award for Best Director, winning for the 2009 film “The Hurt Locker”

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R59ba TIL about the Diprotodon – the largest marsupial ever. It weighed up to 3,500 kg (close to an Asian elephant), looked like some capybara on steroids and was likely driven to extinction by humans some 40,000 years ago
OGYKX TIL The US Geologic Survey analyzes twitter data that can often identify earthquakes faster than their own sensors as well as filter out false positives from their sensors.
QVoL TIL there is a mysterious expanding black goo called La Mancha Negra (the black stain) that covers parts of roads in Caracas, Venezuela. Millions of dollars have been spent researching it, yet the cause is still unknown. 1,800 people have died in auto accidents due to the goo.
D11Op “At any given moment, there are 1,800 thunderstorms happening somewhere on Earth. This amounts to 16 million storms each year! We know the cloud conditions that produce lightning, but we cannot forecast the location or time of a lightning strike.”
6EpQw TIL that undercover FBI agent Joseph Pistone led to over 200 indictments and over 100 convictions of Mafia members. The man who introduced Pistone to the Mafia was murdered for having allowed an FBI agent to infiltrate the family; he was shot dead and his hands were cut off.