› added 11 years ago

77

TIL that Sylvan Goldman, inventor of the shopping cart, had to hire actors to walk around his store pushing shopping carts to convince customers to use them. Men didn’t want to seem feminine by using them and women didn’t want to feel like they were pushing a baby buggy.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

dDXMK TIL: Prairie dogs build their burrows with a flat orifice at one end and a mounded one at the other. During a breeze, the different surface geometries create a pressure differential via the Bernoulli effect, forcing air to flow from the flat end to the mounded end, ventilating the burrow.
nlmd TIL A Mansion is being built in the Ozarks which is designed to be earthquake resistant, bullet proof, blast proof, tornado resistant, bug resistant, fire resistant, and shall need little to no net energy to heat or cool.
dDaZ8 TIL: There is 12,000 year old rock art in the middle of the Sahara Desert, created by humans when the Sahara was still green and full of life. Some historians believe the human experience of watching the Sahara dry up still exists today as the story of the Garden of Eden
7PPr TIL We are still in the Ice Age
oRY9E TIL Mathematician Kurt Godel's wife Adele was employed as a dancer at a cabaret when they met. Aside from the continuing disapproval of his family, Adele faced rejection and isolation in the academic community as well, particularly when the couple settled at Princeton Institute for Advanced Study