› added 5 years ago

119

TIL that the word for roller coasters literally translates to "Russian Mountains" in many languages, due to the fact that roller coasters originate from slides made of ice in Russia around the 17th century. However, in Russian, they are known as "американские горки"--American Mountains.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

l76kr TIL green bell peppers were just red/yellow/orange peppers but in their unripe form
QK1d TIL: Aitzaz Hasan, 15 yr old boy, died when he bravely confronted a suicide bomber walking towards his school which resulted in early detonation of the bomb. His action saved the lives of hundreds of students.
Wk6QY TIL Jim Parsons thought "The Big Bang Theory" was a game show before auditioning for it. He confused Chuck Lorre with Chuck Woolery, who was the original host of Wheel of Fortune.
L4Om TIL that there is a scientific measurement for the ‘risk of death’ of any action: the micromort. If an activity is rated as one micromort, you would have a one in a million chance of dying while doing it. Running a marathon is ~7 micromorts, sky diving 10, and climbing Mount Everest 40,000!
Oo907 TIL authors C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley both died on November 22nd, 1963. Their deaths weren't as prominent in the news because of a more noteworthy death that occurred on that day: the assassination of John F. Kennedy