› added 9 years ago

14045

TIL the scientists (and everyone else) in Antarctica have ‘heedless sex’ (16,500 condoms are distributed to 200 people spending the winter), taking 'ice wives’ and 'ice husbands,’ and also binge-drink, do drugs and generally go completely nuts, and is pretty much the only reason anyone goes back.

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BgXPL TIL that Naked Mole-Rats are “the longest-lived rodent, … almost never get cancer, … don’t feel pain like other mammals, they live in underground colonies and [… ] don’t have a drop in fertility as they age.”
m1ErR TIL medieval Londoners could hail link-boys to carry torches and guide them through the streets at night-time. These boys were called mooncursers in thieves' cant.
Jg54 TIL that at 2:58 in the Hey Jude, you can hear ‘fucking hell’ as Paul McCartney screws up on the piano. The band thought it was funny enough to leave in.
9pnB TIL scientists, via brain scanning, communicated with a man in coma who told them he was not in pain.
kOX5g TIL that the first nuclear explosion almost occurred by accident in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Dr. Richard Feynman, a physicist who was working on the Manhattan Project, discovered that the military's "need to know" security resulted in a dangerous amount of uranium nitrate being stored with uranium-235.