› added 6 years ago

49

TIL Dutch marathon swimmer Maarten van der Weijden successfully battled Leukemia and made a comeback to win the Olympics Gold in 10 km open water. He has now raised 2.5 million Euro for cancer research by swimming 165 km in 55 hours.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

P1a9O TIL The volcano Mauna Loa makes up 51% of the landmass of Hawai'i (the Big Island)
9YjBM TIL that during the scrapping of the SS Great Eastern in 1890, the body of one of the original builders was found inside the double hull-he had gone missing in 1853.
yQBP8 TIL: Radio commentator Paul Harvey’s father was murdered in Tulsa when Paul was a boy.
d8WdK TIL about the Doomsday Algorithm - a method to mentally calculate the day of the week given any date based on the fact that 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, 12/12 all occur on the same day of the week regardless of the year.
ynew TIL A Japanese farmer discovered a gold seal while repairing an irrigation ditch in 1784. The seal turned out to be 95% pure gold and was a gift from the Chinese Emperor to a Japanese envoy from 54 CE, the earliest recorded date of contact between the two countries