› added 4 years ago

75

TIL the earliest recorded use of LOL as an initialism was for "little old lady" in the 1960s. During the Apollo mission, ferrite cores were used as transformers and acted as either a binary one or zero. The LOLs created the required software by weaving together sequences of one and zero cores.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

m1wvY TIL the Mona Lisa has no eyebrows.
4kLKN TIL : Hummingbirds are one of the few bird species who pee. Other birds excrete urine in solid form, but hummingbirds consume so much water through the nectar they drink that their urine is liquid.
xbN5 TIL the flag of Bikini Atoll is symbolic of the islanders’ belief that a debt is still owed by the U.S. to the atoll because of the thermonuclear detonations on the islands.
GRp7 TIL Mormon founder Joseph Smith purchased Egyptian papyri from a traveling mummy exhibit. His translation of the text was entirely inaccurate but Mormons still regard this text to be true and as sacred as the Bible or Book of Mormon.
wLxMP TIL following a public petition to release him, at the age of 100 Bill Wallace, an Australian man who had spent several decades in an institution for the criminally insane, was allowed to leave. He refused, reportedly saying "“Don’t be f***ing silly, I live here.”.