› added 11 years ago

73

TIL the whip is the first man made device capable of breaking the sound barrier. Also, the crack of the whip is actually a sonic boom.

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69YRl TIL that during WW2, they experimented with running London buses on gas that's produced from burning coal. The gas was produced on a trailer that was towed by the buses.
Brwoe TIL that the blue whale heart rate was measured for the first time last year! It gets as low as 2 beats per minute, raising up to 37 when it resurfaces (more oxygen access). It works at physiological extremes, and explains why the whale never evolved to be even bigger.
W7VPo TIL some of the last German Soldiers to fight the Red Army during the Battle of Berlin were in fact foreign volunteers of the Waffen SS. Frenchmen of the 33rd Charlemagne Division and Scandinavians of the 11th Nordland Division joined together as some of the last defenders of the Third Reich.
LDaV TIL that in 1962 scientists injected an elephant with a dose of LSD that was 3000 times a typical human dose. Five minutes later the elephant trumpeted, fell down, shit itself, went into a perpetual brain seizure, and then died an hour and forty minutes later.
grrWX TIL in the Industrial Age, some foods were colored with poisonous things like various colors of lead and copper salts. Food coloring was used to hide bad quality and to imitate other foods as well. This made food poisoning common during this time.