› added 4 years ago

155

TIL only less than 2% of the uranium in Little Boy, the bomb that was dropped onto Hiroshima, actually fissioned. This was still enough to kill 66,000 people and have a fatal blast radius of 1.3km.

Read more atomicheritage.org

via reddit.com

ep7RE TIL that the ship's bell of the SS Terra Nova of Robert Falcon Scott's last polar expedition is rung everyday at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge when everyone in the institute is invited for coffee in the morning and tea in the afternoon, as is British Tradition.
w5DY TIL that a historian in the Warsaw Ghetto organized a massive effort to record everything that was happening there, including everything from diaries to photographs and letters. The collection, called Oyneg Shabbos, was buried in three places in 1943, and the largest part hasn’t yet been found.
rRWEx TIL that the director of The Little Mermaid ,Ron Clements received a letter from a New Jersey State Trooper saying that, after seeing the movie and being driven to tears by it, he called his estranged daughter to reconcile their own relationship, just as Ariel and Triton did.
eJYE TIL that after hurricane Katrina, FEMA distributed thousands of trailers with toxic levels of formaldehyde, were sued, and then sold them after a court order expired
kONl1 TIL that transparent aluminum, the fictitious material in the Star Trek Voyage Home film (1986) has been actually invented.