› added 5 years ago

206

TIL that Marcin Jakubowski, a Princeton fusion physics graduate, had a hard time finding a job out of college so he turned to farming. Upon purchasing his first tractor, he realized how inaccessible and expensive farming equipment was, so he created an open source tractor design.

Read more opensourceecology.org

via reddit.com

OwV4 TIL in 2016, with the support of her mother, a U.K. teenage girl with terminal cancer successfully petitioned London’s High Court for the right to be cryogenically frozen. The girl died with the knowledge that she would be frozen, and her body was sent to the U.S. for long-term cryogenic storage.
vPXv7 Today I learned: the average cloud weighs 600 tonnes, and the sun heats up the air causing it to rise and push up the clouds keeping them high in the sky
dDynd TIL that The battle on ice, known as the 'ice massacre', is the only instance in history of a full-scale battle on a frozen lake, resulting in the Teutonic knights being dramatically defeated when the ice gave way beneath them under the weight of their armour
LdPZ TIL Hugh Trenchard, a British soldier in the Boer War, was shot in the chest and spine, becoming partially paralyzed. He took up bobsledding as a hobby, and after a major accident regained use of his legs.
va4x TIL The US army once played a $250 million war game - a lone general defeated the US army in one day. Subsequently the rules were changed to make it impossible for the US to lose.