› added 12 years ago

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TIL that NASA did not actually spend $12 billion on a Space Pen while the Russians used a pencil.

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via reddit.com

yQl5V TIL in 2016, Shabani, a male Gorilla at a Japanese zoo received worldwide attention when women started flocking to see him as they thought him to be extremely handsome and manly. The crowds of women yelling his name made him so uncomfortable, zoo staff had to put up signs telling them to stop
Z8X7G TIL that Dimebag Darrel, former lead guitarist of Pantera, asked Eddie Van Halen if he could have a copy of the "Bumblebee" that appears on the back cover of Van Halen II. Eddie said yes, but never got around to it. After hearing the news of Dimebag's death, he had the original buried with Darrel.
6EbKm TIL, the heliocentric theory and spherical earth concepts were proposed by Yajnavalkya, an indian astronomer in 8th-9th BCE. He also calculated the distance between earth and sun, and moon. He also calculated the duration of an year to a precision of 6 minutes longer than modern measurement.
awvDJ TIL: That in 1959 a Russian zoologist named Dmitri Belyaev started a investigation into domestication (using Foxes) that is basically ongoing to this day.
9Ymbm TIL about Operation Pluto, an operation to lay submarine oil pipelines under the English Channel in support of the Allied invasion of Normandy during WWII. The two pipelines, "Bambi" and "Dumbo", carried 180 million imperial gallons of petrol to the Allied Expeditionary Force in North West Europe.