› added 10 years ago

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TIL of Starfish. A 60’s US military experiment designed to see what would happen when a nuke was detonated 250 miles above Earth’s magnetic pole. It resulted in an EMP 900 miles wide, an intense artificial aurora, and a radiation belt that disabled 1/3 of the low orbit satellites and lasted 5 years.

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RXO1 TIL That Siri records everything you say, which is then held and used for analysis and research for 2 years.
0dwWj TIL that French explorer Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier discovered Bouvet Island in 1739 but then mislabelled the coordinates, causing it to be lost until it's rediscovery 8 decades later in 1808.
OGxdg TIL There were nazi prisoner camps in rural Virginia towards the end of WW2. They were there to, among other things, to pick apples while American Servicemen were fighting in Europe.
ZperQ TIL about Frank’s sign, a crease that may form on your earlobe that can be a sign of poor cardiovascular health
PVdL TIL John Wayne was in his hotel room, below Frank Sinatra’s, who was having a party. The noise kept Wayne up so he went to his room and yelled at him. A guard came saying, “Nobody talks to Sinatra that way.” Wayne slapped the man and knocked him out by breaking a chair on top of him. The noise ended