› added 4 years ago

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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.

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QDn6 TIL - Two scientists skinned, boiled and swallowed a shrew without chewing it, and then carefully examined the excrement and how the carcass reacts within the human digestive system. They were rewarded the ‘Ig Noble Prize’ for their findings.
6ELrX TIL The cashew "apple" is a light reddish to yellow fruit, whose pulp can be processed into a sweet, astringent fruit drink or distilled into liquor. The cashew “nut” is the seed of the fruit. The shell of the cashew seed is used for lubricants, waterproofing, paints and arms production.
vPp4L TIL that in 1958, Burma-Shave offered a "free trip to Mars" for sending in 900 empty jars. A grocery store manager, Arliss French, took it literally and collected all 900. To save face, Burma-Shave sent him, fully dressed as an astronaut, to Moers, Germany (of which they felt was pronounced Mars).
xvgg TIL that American car seats are illegal to use in most of the rest of the world due to the addition of the chest clip
GYANQ Dumping all our nuclear waste in a volcano does seem like a neat solution for destroying the roughly 29,000 tons of spent uranium fuel rods stockpiled around the world. But there's a critical standard that a volcano would have to meet to properly dispose of the stuff, explains Charlotte Rowe, a volcano geophysicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. And that standard is heat. The lava would have to not only melt the fuel rods but also strip the uranium of its radioactivity.