› added 9 years ago

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TIL the richest man that drowned on the Titanic, John Jacob Astor IV, left his wife a five million-dollar fund, the use of his mansion in New York, one of his limos, and five of his prize horses on the condition she wouldn’t remarry… she did.

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QNv7e TIL that an Ethiopian athlete, unable to find a suitable pair of shoes, ran the marathon barefoot at the 1960 Olympics in Rome, won the race, and set a new world record.
R7R9w 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.
GYBv7 TIL the No Child Left Behind Act requires high schools to give recruiters kids’ contact information unless the parents specifically opt out
yVmge TIL during the 1960s–70s “Secret War” in Laos, the US covertly trained and led the indigenous Hmong people to fight the communist Pathet Lao party and North Vietnamese troops. At its peak, around 30,000–40,000 Hmong fighters were involved.
kJQ64 TIL that the scientific name of the jojoba plant stems from a mistake made by a botanist, who misread “Calif.” (on a specimen collection label) as “China”. Thus, he gave it the specific name “chinensis”, incorrectly thinking it was native to China.