› added 4 years ago

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TIL that Einstein's support for pacifist, civil rights and left-wing causes in Europe had drawn suspicion from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, and after his arrival to America, the Bureau launched what would eventually become a 22-year surveillance campaign since the FBI believed Einstein was a Soviet spy.

BZly TIL when Anders Celsius invented the temperature scale, he put 100 degrees as the point for freezing and 0 degrees as the point for boiling. Another scientist, Carl Linnaeus, waited until Celsius had died to change the scale to the way we read it today.
8a01G TIL Zimbabwe has what many experts believe to be the largest diamond field in the world. With extraction of over 17Million carats. This mining region is size of the German capital Berlin, these diamonds are sent to the EU to be refined.
PYKJV TIL there was a natural nuclear reactor in present-day Gabon that produced about 100kw of energy 2 billion years ago, running for thousands of years. This is the only known example of naturally occurring nuclear fission.
x689D TIL In Western music, microtones are notes that deviate from the standard 12-note scale. These are the notes that can sound "flat" or "sharp" compared to the notes in the 12-note scale, like the "out-of-tune piano" part in the Beatles’ “Rocky Raccoon.”
Egmlo TIL that composer Sebastian Plano created a musical album called Keynvor (the Cornish word for ocean) made entirely of ocean sounds from the cornish coast and piano. Each song is named a Lat/Long coordinate to the place where the ocean sounds were recorded. All proceeds went to ocean restoration.