› added 11 years ago

69

TIL Railguns are capable of firing objects with a muzzle velocity of 20 km/s (mach 59) but generate so much heat that repetitive tests would wear down the rails too quickly to be efficient.

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ym7V TIL The Korean soccer player who scored and knocked Italy out of the 2002 World Cup immediately lost his contract with his Italian club Perugia for ‘ruining Italian soccer’.
xYQg TIL If all new cars produced were powered by lithium batteries, the world would run out of lithium in ~30 years.
x6JbB TIL that Mary Edwards Walker, the only female recipient of the Medal of Honor, was a surgeon, abolitionist, prisoner of war and freethinker who challenged traditional gender roles. She was also a pioneer in a Victorian dress reform movement called "rational dress" as seen in photographs of the time
E1pnX TIL that during the French Revolution the bodies of over 100 French royals were exhumed and tipped into mass graves. Parts of them were also seized; one man took "Dagobert’s jaw, a section of Saint Louis’ skull, the teeth of Henry III, Philippe Auguste’s hair and the leg of Catherine de' Medici".
p1GO TIL a circus elephant named Mary was hanged to death in Tennessee for allegedly murdering a hobo.