› added 7 years ago

569

Let’s say you’re doing 100 mph in a car and suddenly a downed tree, stopped the car, or person appears in the road up ahead and you need to slam on the brakes. How much more dangerous is that situation than when you’re doing 70 mph? Your intuition might tell you that 100 mph is only 30% more than 70 mph. But as this video shows, the important factor in stopping a car (or what happens to the car when it collides with something else) does not speed but energy, which increases at the square of speed. In other words, going from 70 mph to 100 mph more than doubles your energy…and going from 55 to 100 more than triples it.

E1xyV TIL there is a monument in Dalby, Queensland commemorating a species of moth that eradicated the invasive Prickly Pear Cactus that had spread across 15000 square miles of Australia.
aAN0 TIL President George H.W. Bush was 17 when told of Pearl Harbor. He defied his Dad to join the Navy, becoming its youngest flier and a Pacific hero. Now, he doesn’t like to discuss it.
Yp9GG TIL before the D-Day invasion, Eisenhower threatened to step down because he wanted to divert Allied strategic bombers that had been hammering German industrial plants to instead begin bombing critical French infrastructure. The threat worked and bombing commenced, ending World War II.
WkKr8 TIL about a Kiek in de Kök. An artillery tower in Tallinn, Estonia, built in 1475. It gained the name from the ability of tower occupants to see into kitchens of nearby houses.
x6bXB TIL that the pimp from the movie Taxi Driver was originally written to be black as it matched what the writer of the movie was seeing in everyday life but he was changed to white as it was thought to have been unpalatable to audiences