› added 11 years ago

104

TIL 1 Millihelen is the amount of beauty required to launch a single ship.

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j6kBE TIL that inventors of the two most impactful weapon technologies of WWII, Merle Tuve (proximity fuse) and Ernest Lawrence (uranium enrichment for the atomic bomb) were childhood friends and neighbors from the same small town in South Dakota
9wbXm TIL Elephants can distinguish human voices by sex, age, ethnicity, and language.
pYZR8 TIL Jack Ketch, Charles I's executioner, became so notorious for botched executions that his name became a synonym for death and he once wrote an apology letter for beheading someone so poorly.
yr98 TIL that most senior animators at Disney chose to work on Pocahontas rather than the Lion King as many at Disney had little faith in the project, leaving mostly first time animators to work on the Lion King.
LQjdP TIL that in the past decade, some obese patients were sent to zoos for MRI and CT scans because standard hospital machines couldn't accommodate their weight. Zoos have larger scanners designed for big animals, making them a practical solution in these cases.