› added 2 years ago

151

TIL: Hexane, made from crude oil, is used to extract oil from vegetables.

Read more epa.gov

via reddit.com

QJMa9 TIL Seattle was given nearly a billion dollars in the 60s to build a subway system but never did after the voters voted against it.
jN8Yp TIL USA had thousands of horse mounted "mechanized" cavalry in World War II and horses were eventually replaced by Jeeps.
W7V0N TIL About the purple Earth hypothesis. It states that the Earth may have been more purple in colour due to retinal being used instead of chlorophyll by the microorganisms in Earth's environmentally harsh past.
lokrB TIL that during the Great Depression, a prominent attorney flipped $2 (inflation adjusted $31) into $100,000 ($1,500,000). He then proceeded to award the money to the woman who could give birth to the most amount of kids in the following decade.
4XwKg TIL about Ada Lovelace, an English mathematician born in 1815, regarded as one of the first computer programmers. She was the first to write a set of instructions - "notes" - intended to be carried out by a machine. She was a friend with Charles Babbage and other important scientists of the time.