› added 7 years ago

185

TIL that silly string has military usage in the detection of tripwires. The string would settle onto the ground in areas without tripwires, but catch on to any that is present. The silly string reveals the wire, but it will not set it off due to its light weight.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

jNMEn TIL in 1946, a local chicken farmer offered 100 chicks for each homer the Nashua Dodgers hit. Newcomer Roy Campanella hit 14 in his first season and sent all 1,400 to his father who used them to start a thriving poultry farm. He also went on to become one of the first black major league players.
rRrpM TIL You don't get vitamin D from the sun. You make vitamin D from cholesterol in its inactive form. Inside your cells, this inactive form gets subjected to UV light which is provided by the sun and then gets activated. That's where the whole "vitamin D from the sun" idea comes from.
XwvE TIL that suicide surpassed combat as the leading cause of military deaths in 2012 and has remained as the top killer ever since.
5Ywyr TIL that even the Ku Klux Klan classifies the Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group; the KKK were one of the main counter protesters against the Church's anti-Memorial Day protests at the Arlington Cemetery, Virginia
d8emQ TIL the Finns sarcastically dubbed the Soviet cluster bombs "Molotov bread baskets" in reference to Molotov's propaganda broadcasts. When the hand-held bottle firebomb was developed to attack Soviet tanks, the Finns called it the "Molotov cocktail", as "a drink to go with the food".