› added 6 years ago

73

TIL Jon "NEVERDIE" Jacobs mortgaged his home to buy a virtual asteroid for $100,000. In 2005, this was the most valuable virtual item ever sold. This landed him in the Guinness Book of World Records for owning the most expensive virtual item, which he later sold for $635,000.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

9XQX TIL:DNA barcoding was used to discover that of 1215 seafood samples from 674 restaurants and grocery stores in 21 U.S. states, a full third were mislabeled; The menu says red snapper, but it’s actually tilapia. The white tuna, meanwhile, is really escolar, while the seabass is Antarctic toothfish.
OOX7 TIL a waiter for the Ritz in Dubai overheard a man with his wheelchair-bound wife say it was a shame he couldn’t get her down to the beach. The waiter told maintenance, and the next afternoon there was a wooden walkway down the beach to a tent that was set up for them to have dinner in.
8jjG TIL A surprise inspection of a men’s prison in Acapulco unearthed 100 plasma TVs, 2 sacks of marijuana, 2 peacocks, 100 cockerels for cock fighting… and 25 women.
D1O6v TIL Quokkas don't really throw their babies at predators
Ooaa7 TIL of the "Gates of Hell" in Turkministan. In 1971, a Soviet drilling rig accidently punctured an underground natural gas cavern. To head off a environmental catastrophe, the Soviets set the gas on fire. The crater has been burning continuously for 47 years since.