› added 11 months ago

69

TIL Qatar is among the top foreign funder of American universities, donating ~$4.7 billion between 2001 and 2021

Read more nas.org

via reddit.com

d86Jd TIL: The French drain may have been invented in France but Henry Flagg French described and popularized them in his 1859 book Farm Drainage
6mKm TIL that the color purple is the royal color because the dye was so expensive to make: “dye-makers had to crack open the snail’s shell, extract a purple-producing mucus and expose it to sunlight for a precise amount of time. It took as many as 250,000 mollusks to yield just one ounce of usable dye”
E1PRp TIL that chickens are omnivorous and will eat from grass to insects to large rodents, even each other if they get too hungry.
8eEbG TIL in 1999, the Georgia Institute of Technology created an organic computer out of leech neurons.
OogyX TIL that in 1931, a man stole an airplane but was acquitted on all charges because airplanes were not considered "vehicles" and there was no law against aircraft theft at the time.