› added 8 years ago

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TIL An ant mill is an observed phenomenon in which a group of army ants, which are blind, are separated from the main foraging party, lose the pheromone track and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle. The ants will eventually die of exhaustion.

PYa9E TIL Norway sends the UK Christmas trees every year as a symbol of gratitude for “preserving Norwegian liberty” during World War 2.
0pwp TIL Fairview Cemetary, Halifax has a grave marked “J. Dawson” which still gets flowers left today following the release of the 1997 film “Titanic”
pbQ8 TIL in 1846, John Torrington perished during an expedition to find the Northwest Passage. When his corpse was exhumed 138 years later, it was almost perfectly preserved – eyes wide open, clothing intact, and limbs so flexible that moving him felt like moving someone unconscious rather than dead.
Dk1V TIL that NASA is creating an “interstellar internet”, called Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN). It can transmit information through solar storms, solar flares, and even past planets without losing any original data. It successfully sent images to a spacecraft located 20 million miles from earth.
9YRwX TIL Christopher Nolan got $160M for Interstellar because WB let him have a salary of $20M+20% of the total gross. This was because WB was not confident of it being a success and didn't think 20% would be much. This lack of faith in it's success was also why they let other studios co-finance the film