› added 11 years ago

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TIL Sally Ride (the first American woman in space) was a lesbian. It was only after her death that her 27 year relationship with Tam O'Shaughnessy was revealed by Ride’s sister (a minister).

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WWBo TIL that barns are actually red because in the late 1700s, Farmers began experimenting with ways to make their own protective paint with lime, red iron oxide, and skimmed milk with linseed oil which kept the barn warm during wintertime.
W7V4d TIL that between March 1910 and September 1911 a pressurized oil well explosion formed the Lakeview Gusher, releasing 9 million barrels of crude oil and flooding the area in rivers of oil. It's a "miracle" that the oil field had not caught fire and the event remains the worst oil spill in history.
L7G0 TIL a 57yo Japanese man has been learning to SCUBA dive specifically so he can look for his wife’s remains after she was presumably swept away during the 2011 tsunami. He says her last email to him was “… I want to go home”, and he is determined to make that happen.
Qmgd TIL that Wernher von Braun the “Father of Rocket Technology” didnt do well in math and physics initially but forced himself to learn after he had read book about space exploration.
WkmbY TIL that the developers of the racing simulator game Assetto Corsa were attempting to find the source of what they believed to be a bug with the in-game traction control. In reality, the "bug" was the simulation accurately recreating a real world physics problem they were unaware of.