› added 9 years ago

240

TIL Herbert C. Brown’s “wife, bought him the book ‘The Hydrides of Boron and Silicon’ by Alfred Stock as a graduation gift. The book was chosen…because - at $2 - it was the cheapest in the University of Chicago bookstore.” In 1979, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work with Boron.

Read more rsc.org

via reddit.com

YNDG TIL that the US military briefly investigated the Journal of Irreproducible Results, a comedic publication satirizing academia, after finding their joke article on how to build a nuclear bomb filed away at the abandoned Al Qaeda headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan.
AN0r4 TIL sore muscles a day after a workout are not caused by lactic acid build up. It's called DOMS, delayed onset muscle soreness, and it's mainly general inflammation and microdamage.
gra4X TIL the first mayor of African descent of a Western world capital was Severiano de Hereida, a Cuban-born naturalised French citizen who advocated for the separation of church and state and was an early ecologist. He's also notable as the father of the influential neurophycisist Marcelle de Hereida.
gok4 TIL dust / dirt devils are called “djin” meaning “genie” or “devil” in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, and Jordan. This is where the mythical genie came from and why genies are typically depicted without legs.
PYlMw TIL Al-Khwarizmi from Baghdad around A.D. 800 worked on a value of pi calculated to four decimal digits: 3.1416. The term 'algorithm' derives from his name, and his text Kitab al-Jabr wal-Muqabala gives us the word 'algebra' (from al-Jabr, which means 'completion' or 'restoration')