› added 6 years ago

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TIL that a whale-sized asteroid, which could have easily destroyed an area the size of New York on collision, flew past Earth at nearly nine kilometers per sec. Surprisingly, the U.S. space agency, NASA, failed to detect the asteroid and spotted it only the day after it skimmed past the planet.

4PEN TIL that the Higgs boson, commonly refered to as the “God Particle”, was originally intended to be name the “goddamn particle”, but Leon Lederman’s publisher asked that it be changed. Higgs, an atheist, was unhappy with the nickname because he thought the term “might offend people who are religious”
1bn4 TIL The French tried to counter attack Germany in 1939, but were repulsed by “The silent soldier”…“a definitive weapon of the war”. New German mines that would fire themselves out of the ground before going off, wounding not just the soldier, but everybody else around them, as well.
rR9Yy TIL that in 1899 the last surviving native Tasmanian recorded a song, the only record of her vanished language
d8o6Q TIL that the team behind The Sims had originally decided to leave same-sex relationships out of the game until a newbie on the team by the name of Patrick J. Barrett III coded all basic interactions of the game due to one of his senior team members being on vacation
D1dlD TIL of the Night Witches, a female only Soviet bomber regiment during World War 2. They would fly high up in their quieter WW1 bombers, cut their engines, and bomb the German front line in the middle of the night. This earned them the nickname "Nachthexen" by the Germans.