› added 10 years ago

637

TIL concrete can be made translucent by incorporating optical fibers in merely 4% of its volume. The material feels and behaves just like concrete, but allows light to pass through.

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bGaE TIL that 91 years ago, the most destructive tornado ever recorded in US history was formed. It was reportedly on the ground for 3 hours and 30 min, cutting a swath through 3 states and killing 695 people
RxZw TIL Alexandra David-Neel disguised herself as a beggar and crossed a frozen, 19,000ft mtn pass in winter to get into Lhasa, witnessed murders and battles, had to barter for passage with warlords, crossed Mongolia and the Gobi desert, became incredibly ill, and boiled her boots to avoid starvation
Z0P4 TIL The Jewish population today is still below pre-Holocaust levels
9YGDD TIL The son of Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi used his connections to sign for a top-level Italian soccer team. He only ever played ten minutes, and one sportswriter said, "Even at twice his current speed, he would still be twice as slow as slow itself"
0wJR5 TIL the first close up photo from Mars was taking so long to print that impatient scientists taped the raw data to the wall and colored over it with pastel crayon manually assigning color and value to the binary code.