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TIL James Lick, once the wealthiest Californian, donated the world's first permanently staffed mountaintop telescope to the University of California in 1888. His will only stipulated that he is to be buried under it and fresh flowers placed on his grave "always".

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YR0W TIL if each star in our galaxy had a trillion planets, with a trillion people living on them, and each of these people has a trillion packs of cards and somehow they manage to make unique shuffles 1,000 times per second since the Big Bang, they’d only be starting to repeat shuffles now.
xVn05 TIL From 1847, Rudolf Wolf started counting sunspots. He peered through a telescope every day, if he could, and recorded the number of spots he observed. Today, all sorts of models use Wolf's sunspot record to predict things like the climate, the orbit of satellites, and the stability of power grids
e0vbE TIL that the water which is shipped to the International Space Station all comes from 2 sources in Italy. One source supplies water for the USA segment of the ISS and the other source to the Russian side based on the tastes of the astronauts and the method used to purify the water on board.
WkmMd TIL that the DeLorean car, made famous by Back to the Future (1985) relied on the British Government for about $120 million of its $200 million start-up cost to build a plant in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The DeLorean Motor Company (DMC) went bankrupt in 1982 and approximately 9,000 cars were made.
9Ml6 TIL that Wilson the volleyball from the movie ‘Cast Away’ won a 'Best Inanimate Object’ award.