› added 6 years ago

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TIL 9 year old Rachel Beckwith started a $300 fundraiser for clean water. She asked friends and family to donate $9 instead of B-day presents. She only raised $220, and sadly died in a car accident soon after. Her story spread, her $220 grew to $1.2 million, providing clean water to 37,770 people.

Read more my.charitywater.org

via reddit.com

kbNg TIL only two percent of the fissile material in Little Boy, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, actually detonated. In other words, seven-tenths of a gram of Uranium-235 leveled a two-mile radius of the city.
XEZN6 TIL that Gene Simmons of Kiss saw Van Halen at a club in 1976 and decided to produce a demo tape for them. However, when he took the demo tape to Kiss management he was told that "they had no chance of making it" and that they wouldn't take them, so he opted out of further involvement.
ZpKND TIL 85,200 Swiss women lost from 1848-1952 their citizenship when marrying foreigners due to the "marriage rule". If they married Jews denationalized by Nazi Germany, they became stateless and some died in gas chambers. A 1952 revision allowed retention or reinstatement of citizenship.
8aa4Z TIL that if you find a worm in a wrapped chocolate bar, it is probably the Cocoa moth, Ephestia Elutella. When these moths are present in the factory, there’s a possibility their eggs are present in the finished product. The hatched larvae is discovered when someone bites into the chocolate.
wLPVW TIL the Soviet space shuttle looked identical to the American shuttle because it was built off of stolen NASA designs.