› added 12 years ago

209

TIL Americans now spend more money on slot machines than movies, baseball, and theme parks combined.

Read more 99percentinvisible.org

via reddit.com

d8DWd No one is entirely sure. Water has high surface tension, yet the molecules at its surface are unstable, which makes the air-surface interface mysterious and difficult to describe. Satoshi Nihonyanagi, a researcher at a molecular-spectroscopy lab in Japan, studies water and its surface—"specifically probing the interface," he calls it—using isotopically diluted H2O, which doesn't vibrate and is easier to observe. He's found that some water molecules are bound to others by a single hydrogen bond.
yQZ0e TIL that Franklin D Roosevelt's grandfather Warren Delano made a fortune smuggling opium into China around the time of the first Opium War
8a6kL TIL American Gothic depicts a farmer and his daughter not his wife.
kLM1 TIL the original author of the Forrest Gump novel wrote a sequel to the book entitled “Gump and Co.” During the book he crashes the Exxon Valdez, helps destroy the Berlin Wall, and fights in Operation Desert Storm.
BgVaD TIL in 1318 a pretender to the throne, John Deydras, was hanged for sedition. At trial he had blamed his cat (devil in disguise). So they hanged the cat as well.