› added 5 years ago

74

TIL that in 1947, a ship carrying ammonium nitrate exploded, ripping the wings off airplanes flying nearby, launching its 2 ton anchor over a mile and a half away, blowing out windows 10 miles away, decimating the entire port of Texas City and the surrounding areas, killing at least 581 people.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

5YwZk TIL of king penguin, Lala who was injured and nursed back to health in Japan. He didn't leave so the family adopted him and lived in a air-conditioned room. He walked around the neighborhood and got himself fishes from the store. He lived with the family for 10 years before dying of old age in 1996.
bdlE TIL that Secretariat was such a dominant race horse partly because his heart was roughly two and a half times the size of an average horse. His ample girth, long back and well made neck contributed to his heart-lung efficiency.
4XDw6 TIL: In 2000, an Australian man, after having his job application rejected, managed to hack into the local government's waste management system using a computer and radio, flooding parks, rivers, and the lawn of a hotel with raw sewage.
Mb10 TIL “Eating carrots will improve your vision” is actually based in wartime propaganda designed to explain why pilots were able to fly so well at night without revealing the new invention of radar technology to the enemy.
78p4r TIL in 2022, the DEA seized more than 10,000 pounds of Fentanyl and more than 50 million Fentanyl pills. This was more than double the amount seized in 2021 and enough to kill every person in the United States.