› added 6 years ago

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TIL Human kidneys can only make urine that is less salty than salt water. Therefore, to get rid of all the excess salt taken in by drinking seawater, you have to urinate more water than you drank. Eventually, you die of dehydration even as you become thirstier.

Read more oceanservice.noaa.gov

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9bPm TIL Tilda Swinton comes from one of only three families that can trace their unbroken land ownership and lineage to before the Norman Conquest
0wrG1 TIL the bell sounds at the start of "Hells Bells" were made by a bell custom made for AC/DC. It was a replica of the Loughborough War Museum's Denison Bell, which the band could not record due to pigeons in the tower interrupting.
R5dBj TIL that modern nuclear submarines are so well camouflaged that in 2009, two French and British nuclear ballistic missile submarines collided by chance in the Atlantic Ocean. They were moving so slowly that they couldn't have detected each other just a few feet apart.
8aBxK TIL about Clarence Dally, perhaps the first person to die of man-made radiation in 1904. He was an assistant to Thomas Edison on a new x-ray machine. He had to have both of his hands amputated but eventually died from cancer. Edison refused to work with x-rays ever again.
DQgWp TIL the record for the longest name ever used was held by a German-American man. The name is so long it can't fit in this title but was abbreviated as Hubert B. Wolfe + 666 Sr. The name has its origins in his Great-Grandfather's sarcastic response to a law mandating German Jews take a second name.