› added 4 years ago

432

You can see the coronavirus from space, well kind of.

Read more wired.com

rNO9o TIL: To "protect the truth," a woman recorded hundreds of thousands of hours of TV news between 1977 and 2012. Her archives grew to about 71,000 VHS and Betamax tapes stacked in her home and apartments she rented to store them. Upon her death, the Internet Archive agreed to digitize the volumes.
4XNMa TIL that Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser was once awoken to a report of 2,200 incoming Soviet missiles: a false alarm due to the malfunction of a 46 cent chip
KBoJ TIL that Hessian mercenaries made up a quarter of all troops that Great Britain sent to America and roughly 5,000 of the 30,000 sent ended up defecting and settling in North America.
1aXx7 TIL postboxes in the UK bear the 'royal cypher' (initials, basically) of the monarch on the throne at the time they are installed, and have done since Queen Victoria's reign - meaning you can very roughly ascertain how old a postbox is just by looking at it
P1grO TIL that between 2010 and 2012, Jerome Powell worked on getting Congress to raise the U.S. debt ceiling during the debt-ceiling crisis of 2011. He presented the implications to the economy and interest rates of a default or a delay in raising the debt ceiling. He worked for a salary of $1 per year.