› added 2 weeks ago

6

TIL: In 1904, a man survived falling over Niagara Falls without a barrel, becoming the first recorded unprotected fall survivor.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

8eXRa TIL Canadian infantry brought over 1000 of "The Airborne Folding Bicycle" on D-Day, 1944, to travel greater distances than on foot.
DKeg TIL: The discoverer of a gene for Green Fluorescent Protein lost his grant, didn’t get tenure, left academe and was working at a car dealership in Huntsville, Alabama, when he learned that former colleagues had won the Nobel Prize using the gene he sequenced.
EgGR7 TIL about unsinkable Sam, a cat who "served" in both sides of the war and survived the sinking of three boats
QLWa TIL that Researchers have calculated that DNA has a 521 year half-life, meaning the oldest clone-able samples of DNA could be no more than 2 million years old, ruling out any possibility of ever replicating dinosaurs, as the youngest dinosaurs were around more than 65 million years ago.
J1dWv TIL that over 60% of modern Japanese vocabulary is borrowed from Middle Chinese.