› added 6 days ago

Today I learned that there was a fire in one of Titanic's coal rooms prior to the departure from Europe to MY. Titanic had an active smoldering coals the entire voyage.

Read more cnn.com

via reddit.com

R5nR8 TIL Umetaro Suzuki extracted thiamine (which he named Aberic Acid) from rice bran in 1910 but his paper on the subject was poorly translated and ultimately ignored in the West. In 1912 Kazimierz Funk extracted the same substance and named it Vitamine.
KO8pR TIL that roughly 2200 people are bitten by Black Widow spiders in the US each year. Zero of these recorded bites in the last century have resulted in fatalities.
p8dL4 TIL the US Army suppressed a movie on the psychological affects of war on veterans called Let There Be Light. It was made just after WW2 and wasn't released until the 1980s, over 30 years later.
wodRo TIL sharks are older than the Rings of Saturn
e0xN4 TIL that one of the reasons Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to map the American West was to find mastodons—a large, extinct, elephant-like mammal. Jefferson was interested in the fossils being discovered across North America and believed there were still mastodons roaming the unexplored West.