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TIL During an interview with Stephen Hawking, the camera operator mistakenly tugged a cable, triggering an alert and forcing Hawking to slump forward. Everyone panicked, believing they had wounded him, only to discover he was simply laughing at his own joke. The alert was triggered by an office comp

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vPpQj TIL that Greenland is part of North America. I've always considered Greenland part of Europe because the Kingdom of Denmark governs it, and it is technically in the European Union. But alas, it's geographically North American.
OoGOX The sky appears blue for a combination of two reasons. Before white light reaches the Earth's surface, the light waves collide with and bounce off of the nitrogen and oxygen atoms in the atmosphere. Different frequencies of light (in other words different colours) are scattered differently. Higher frequencies (blue and purple) are more easily scattered and thus bounce around in all different directions more than lower frequencies (red or orange) do. The scattering of high frequencies alone would cause the sky to appear blue and purple, but our eyes work better at frequencies near the middle of the spectrum (yellow and green). Since the colour blue is closer to yellow or green than purple is, the sky we see appears blue.
6DjX TIL that L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, falsely claimed to have been a nuclear physicist. In reality, he flunked both high school and college, leaving after his sophomore year at George Washington University during which he failed a course of “Molecular and Atomic Physics.”
grnYL TIL artificial vanilla flavoring used to be made with castoreum, a sac located under a beaver's anus.
P9Mg TIL That adult Luna Moths develop without a mouth, their only purpose is to mate within their 7-day lifespan. After which they die of starvation.