› added 12 years ago

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TIL that when Robert Ballard announced he was mounting a mission to find the Titanic, it was actually a cover story for a classified mission to inspect lost nuclear submarines. They finished before they were due back, so the team spent the extra time at sea looking for the Titanic—and found it.

Read more news.nationalgeographic.com

via reddit.com

a86eN TIL there is an artificial island in Maldives called Thilafushi, which was created as a landfill to help with the waste from the capital city Malé. This dumpsite has been neglected and abandoned for the last three decades and it is now just starting to see positive changes.
rN1j4 TIL While recording her third album, Janet Jackson was harassed by strange men outside her hotel. Instead of running to her producers, she decided to take a stand and 'backed them down'. She decided to write a song about the incident and called it 'Nasty' which became a certified gold single.
xVV6D TIL the wreck of the Titanic is so deep in the ocean that there’s very little oxygen so it doesnt really rust. Instead it is being slowly consumed by anaerobic bacteria (a kind that doesn’t need oxygen to live). Within a few hundred years, a pile of iron ore will be all that remains of the titanic.
PYoZZ TIL that there is still a passenger ocean liner in operation. The Queen Mary 2 offers a regular service from New York City and Southampton, England. It is the only passenger ocean liner in service designed primarily for travel, rather than the leisure of a cruise ship.
M7JXb TIL of the Affair of the Dancing Lamas, where a filmmaker got in trouble with Tibetan authorities after they got offended at Tibetan lamas promoting his documentary with dances. It’s cited as a reason for Tibet receiving less reforms and why it was less prepared for the Chinese invasion of 1950.