› added 11 years ago

174

TIL the Chinese characters for concave and convex are 凹 and 凸.

Read more wiktionary.org

via reddit.com

vPP6r TIL That if you see an orange cat, at 81%, it's a male, while if you see a tri-color cat, it's 99.9% female.
d8eXE TIL that Charles Darwin was an avid beetle collector. One day he found 2 rare beetles and seized one in each hand. He then saw a third one, and thus put one of the beetles he already had into his mouth. It ejected some acid and burnt his tongue, forcing him to spit it out. He lost 2 of the beetles.
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.
5x7k If two pieces of metal with a similar composition (ie, copper on copper) touch in space, they instantly become one. This is a process called “cold welding.”
kOLk7 TIL: just after the end of WW2 Sweden and Greece both had thousands of sightings of UFO's called Ghost Rockets. The US government took them seriously enough that Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower sent war hero Gen. Jimmy Doolittle to Sweden to investigate in 1946.