› added 7 years ago

305

Blood type, metabolism, exercise, shirt color and even drinking beer can make individuals especially delicious to mosquitoes.

88kK TIL that there are enough diamonds found under the Popigai asteroid crater in Russia to supply the world diamond market for 3,000 years.
xVVGk Of all the bodies in our solar system, the sun is probably the one we want to give the widest berth. It gushes radiation, and even though its surface is the coolest part of the star, it burns at about 9,940°F, hot enough to incinerate just about any material. As such, there are no plans to send a manned mission in its direction anytime soon (Mars is much more interesting, anyway), but it can't hurt to figure out at what distance a person would want to turn back. You can get surprisingly close. The sun is about 93 million miles away from Earth, and if we think of that distance as a football field, a person starting at one end zone could get about 95 yards before burning up.
k5r4 TIL That the Soviet Union couldnt figure out how to weld titanium without cracking it, so they built 80% of the Mig-25 out of…stainless steel.
rNAPe TIL that in the 1700s eccentric farmer James Hirst tried to ride a bull like a horse and train an otter to fish but got banned from a town when his wicker carriage crashed into a shop window.
AXn4 TIL C-4 plastic explosive is so chemically stable it can be shot, microwaved, or even set on fire without exploding. Soldiers in Vietnam would sometimes use it for cooking fires, and, supposedly, would eat small amounts to fake illness.