› added 11 years ago

82

TIL that beluga whales that suffer the loss of a child will sometimes “adopt” inanimate objects such as plants, rocks, and, in one case, a caribou carcass.

Read more seaworld.org

via reddit.com

A4R4 TIL that of the of the 139 members elected to the 1934 USSR Central Committee of the Communist Party at the 17th Congress, Stalin had 98 executed. Of 1,996 party members present, 1,108 were arrested, and about two thirds of those executed. Thus it was given the name “The Congress of the Condemned”.
W7JXL TIL I a Venus day is longer than a Venus year (243 days vs. 225 days)
JYXWj TIL Alexandra Elbakyan, a science graduate born in Kazakhstan due to the frustrations of publisher paywalls she found once returning back home from a research internship at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlantis, founded the largest pirate site for academic papers Sci-Hub
Z8dLY TIL The average cloud weighs 1.1 million pounds or 500,000 kg
wLmNY TIL About Walther Wenck, the German commander put in charge of saving Berlin from soviet forces in spring 1945. Understanding the futility of this effort, as they had no resources and were facing soviet wrath, he instead evacuated hundreds of thousands of citizens and surrendered to the Americans.