› added 11 years ago

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TIL the last cipher from the Zodiac Killer, a 340 character code sent to newspapers in 1969, remains unsolved.

Read more zodiackillerciphers.com

via reddit.com

p8YgA TIL that the German grocery store Aldi is actually two stores: Aldi Nord and Aldi Sud. In the US, Aldi Sud has been rebranded as Aldi, and Aldi Nord is what we now know as Trader Joe's.
XEnAP TIL that a blue whale's tongue is as heavy as the average elephant.
GYoxj TIL that in July 2012 an unusually large and strong release of magnetized plasma from the Sun missed the Earth by around nine days. The strength of the eruption was comparable to the 1859 Carrington event that caused damage to electric equipment (mostly telegraph stations) worldwide.
neAJG TIL a large amount of Japanese companies are owned by 'Keiretsu', mega conglomerates of companies historically run by families. One of these Keiretsu, Sumitomo Group, owns Mazda, NEC Corporation, and Nippon Steel, and traces its history back to a Copper Refining business started 1615.
nenmB TIL In 1999, NASA lost a $125 million Mars orbiter because half the project staff used imperial measurements and the other half used metric.