› added 1 year ago

193

TIL: In 1863, a professor named William Henry Perkin was trying to formulate a cure for Malaria but instead he inadvertently created the first commercialized synthetic dye.

Read more britannica.com

via reddit.com

1aWJr Summit, a supercomputer built in the United States for the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is taking the lead from China for the title of world’s speediest computer.
YRGr TIL that ZzzQuil and other sleep aids are actually Benadryl in liquid form
vP1pL TIL the dial on most toasters is not a minute timer. Instead, there's a metal strip that curves when heated, and the numerical setting simply tells the toaster how far that strip must bend before it triggers the toast to pop.
yQ4bv TIL about an experiment that mapped 1 cubic millimeter (about the size of a grain of sand) of mouse brain by slicing it into 25000 pieces and scanning them for 3 months. The completed data set had a size of almost 2 million gigabytes.
ne0Wd TIL North Korea participated in its first World Expo as Kim Jong-Il visited China in 2010, when the North Korean pavillion was featured at Expo Shanghai. Kim Jong Il's rare trip to China prompted speculation that he was seeking help to rescue his country's economy