› added 6 months ago

111

TIL Pineapple were rented in the 17th century because it's so expensive and associated with luxury. People displayed pineapples as dinnertime ornaments on special plates which would allow the pineapple to be seen and admired but surrounded by other, cheaper, fruit for eating.

Read more bbc.com

via reddit.com

4Xaow TIL USS Tang (SS-306) was a Balao-class submarine of WW II launched in 1943. Tang sank 33 ships totalling 116,454 tons and was sunk by own torpedo off China in the Taiwan Strait, 24 October 1944.
yQ8Gl TIL The hottest temperature observed on the Earth, 5.5 trillion kelvin, was produced in 2012 by scientists at the Large Hadron Collider by smashing heavy ions after accelerating them to 99% the speed of light.
wLX9P A new study published February 15 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society finds that the Andromeda galaxy is actually around the same size as our own galaxy. Scientists previously thought Andromeda was about two to three times the size of the Milky Way, and that it would one day swallow us up in a galactic smashup billions of years away. But researchers using a technique to measure “the speed required to escape a galaxy” have figured out why Andromeda is smaller than research has suggested, according to the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR). This could seriously change the outcome of that eventual merger.
d7DB TIL that the word “fascinate” comes from the Latin word “fascinus”, meaning “divine penis”.
LQO9v TIL Abraham Lincoln and George Washington are enshrined as deities at a Shinto shrine in Hawaii