› added 1 year ago

78

TIL that the founder of Chili's restaurant chain, Larry Levine, was inspired to open a restaurant that served chili and burgers and had the friendly environment of the chili cookoffs his Father in-law hosted. His FIL was famed racing driver and performance car constructor, Carroll Shelby.

Read more dmagazine.com

via reddit.com

Me7AA National Geographic Emerging Explorer Leslie Dewan is helping to revolutionize the nuclear power industry by designing a safer, more efficient alternative to today’s reactors.Conventional nuclear reactors only use about 3 to 4 percent of uranium’s accessible energy. The energy left behind is what makes conventional nuclear waste—radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years—so dangerous. Extracting more of the available energy reduces the radioactive lifetime of the waste. To this end, Dewan is helping to develop techniques that extract 96 percent of the available energy.
VMxdm TIL that the Elan "therapeutic" school, infamous for torturing its students who weren't allowed to contact the outside world, had a form of punishment where well behaved students would beat up poorly behaved ones. One student punished in this way was killed. The school covered it up for years.
7rlXL TIL It took 100 days to put out the flames of the 9/11 attacks. Everytime a large chunk of debris was moved a rush of oxygen would severely intensify the flames.
lBkK TIL that during the siege of Jerusalem in 1917, the British started to airdrop cigarettes filled with large doses of Opium, hoping that the Ottomans would be too stoned to fight. It worked.
LkeK9 TIL NASA's three spacecraft losses occurred within a calendar week of one another: Apollo 1 on 1/27, Challenger on 1/28, and Columbia on 2/1