› added 7 years ago

281

TIL that American neurologist Walter Freeman drove around the US performing ice pick lobotomies in a van he coined the lobotomobile.

Read more blogs.scientificamerican.com

via ift.tt

GAooj TIL world's largest functioning musical instrument is the Wanamaker Organ, located in the Macy's department store in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Built-in 1904 for the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, the organ boasts 28,750 pipes, six manuals, and 464 ranks, making it a truly massive and impress
yVjb8 TIL of gamma-ray bursts, immensely energetic explosions that occur when a giant star implodes and becomes a black hole. It can release as much energy in a few seconds as the Sun will in its entire 10-billion-year lifetime. It may also have caused a mass extinction on Earth 440 million years ago.
DmZD TIL That King Charles II of Spain and last of the Spanish Hapsburg rulers was so inbred that his grandmother was also his aunt and all of his great-grandparents were cousins.
wonaY TIL the U.S. government incurs a yearly loss of $110 million from minting pennies.
xOrg TIL in 2009, scientists discovered that a single, ant mega-colony had colonized much of the world on a scale rivaled only by human civilization, including 1 super colony spanning 3,700 miles along the Mediterranean coast.