› added 2 months ago

10

TIL that the Technocracy Movement of the 30’s suggested technical experts become national decision makers rather than politicians, and proposed unifying Northern America from Panama to Greenland.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

V7gQ TIL Utah was the first place in America to pass laws against Marijuana, the mormon church was heavily involved in the enactment of this ban
neDLo TIL that even though actor Fred Gwynne considered Herman Munster one of his favorite roles, the costume (including 40 lbs of foam padding and boots with inflexible soles) caused him severe back pain and made him lose 10 lbs in one month via perspiration.
j0eM TIL Prince used the heartbeat of his unborn son as part of the percussion in his song Sex in the Summer on the album Emancipation. One month before the album was released his son died of a congenital birth defect shortly after birth.
rNeZw TIL about Arthur Arndt, a German physician whose family became the largest known group of Jews to survive by hiding in Nazi Germany.
6EMd8 Hong Kong-based students, Sum Ming Wong and Kin Pong Li designed a door handle that uses light to always keep itself sterilized. The students were inspired by the SARS outbreak in the 2000s and figured that a self-sanitizing door handle is more effective than the chemical-based cleaning processes we are using right now. The handle is made of a glass tube with aluminum caps at each end and the entire handle is covered in a powdered photocatalytic coating made from a mineral called titanium dioxide. The bacteria is decomposed through a chemical reaction that is activated by UV light reacting with the thin coating on the glass tube.