› added 4 years ago

83

TIL that some bacteria can be visible to the naked eye! Thiomargarita namibiensis can grow up to 3/4 of a millimeter (750 μm) due to a cavity that is used to store, and later convert, nitrate.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

oP8Y TIL in 1996, Canadian PM Jean Cretien was confronted at a rally. With no bodyguards present, Cretien choked out his assailant with his bare hands. This takedown has since been named ‘The Shawinigan Handshake’, after Cretien’s hometown.
gMe49 TIL that in the 1950s a man said to his lover that no woman could write erotica like the Marquis de Sade. In response, Anne Desclos wrote a novel that was so obscene that the French authorities tried to take the publisher to court, and Desclos kept her name secret for forty years.
9wgam TIL the color chartreuse is named after Chartreuse liqueur, which is named after the Grande Chartreuse monastery, which is named after the Chartreuse mountains, which is named after the village formerly known as Chartrousse.
Lk6lr TIL the Epic of Gilgamesh depicts stories that are virtually identical to Adam & Eve and Noah’s Flood, but predates the Bible by at least a thousand years, indicating that the Christian stories are not original but derived from ancient Mesopotamian legend
xRYb TIL that a man by the name of Tsutomu Yamaguchi is the only person alive to be officially credited for surviving both nuclear bomb blasts. He was in Hiroshima on business for an employer when the bomb dropped, survived, and then went to work in Nagasaki three days later when the second detonated.