› added 3 years ago

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TIL about Project Rulison. The US detonated a 40 kiloton nuclear weapon underground in rural Colorado. The goal was to liberate natural gas as part of Operation Plowshare. Unfortunately the gas was too radioactive to use in homes.

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via reddit.com

ZE7a TIL A man spent 4 years in jail for plotting to kill Sherriff Joe Arpaio with a pipe bomb. After investigation it was discovered to be an elaborate publicity stunt, with Maricopa police supplying the bomb parts to the man.
oBvxE TIL: If you boil a can of sweetened condensed milk for 3 hours it turns into Caramel.
Wkr8B TIL about Isobel Wylie Hutchison, a Scottish botanist who challenged early 20th-century gender roles by braving the harsh environments of the Arctic and going on "strolls" that went on for hundreds of miles.
ne9Md TIL a man in 2002 found a way to crack the lottery in the US state of Michigan using math and probability. He figured out that if he bought a certain amount of tickets that he would certainly make a profit. He and his wife Marge ended up making millions of dollars.
mw5o TIL London is riddled with dozens of ‘Plague Pits’ of the victims of the Bubonic Plague. Some pits are so thick with bodies it was impossible to drill through the mass of skeletal remains during construction of the Tube