› added 8 years ago

173

TIL an Air Canada passenger flight took a detour and dropped from 37,000 feet to 4,000 feet to help find a stranded yacht off the Australian coast. It took the passengers 25 minutes after the emergency beacon was activated to locate the yacht.

Read more cnn.com

via reddit.com

P1xAV TIL that in 1919, spontaneous combustion caused a fire at a chocolate factory in New York. The chocolate mixture that leaked out, was large enough for rowboats to pass through and children formed a crowd to try and taste it.
OmaL TIL Guatemala has more Nobel Prize winners than it does Olympic medalists.
MeNLA TIL Alice Cooper once threw a live chicken at the audience, thinking it would fly away, and the audience tore it to pieces. After newspapers claimed he had bitten off the chicken's head and drunk its blood on stage, Frank Zappa said "Well, whatever you do, don't tell anyone you didn't do it.".
b60W0 TIL the chemical formula of trisodium citrate is Na3C6H5O7 and is the additive that causes cheese to liquify without separation
XEL8R TIL that the modern usage of the word "slut" dates back to at least 1450 in Middle English.