Post * kO0em — Curious Curator

› added 5 years ago

63

TIL that the Chinese equivalent of "when pigs fly" is "when the sun rises in the West." Other variants include "when the crayfish whistles" (Russian), "when the crow turns white" (Tagalog), "when the fish climbs the poplar" (Turkish), and "when it snows red snowflakes" (Hungarian).

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b087 TIL Pope Francis is the first Jesuit Pope, the first Pope from the America’s, the first Pope from the Southern Hemisphere, and the first Non-European Pope in 1,272 years. I think he is also the first Pope to be a nightclub bouncer.

5Y7AQ TIL during Hurricane Katrina, hundreds of prisoners were left to die in their cells. They had no food or water for days, as waters rose to their chests. There were no lights and the toilets were backed up. Many were evacuated, but 517 went unaccounted for.

EgMlX TIL about John L Burns, a 70-year-old veteran of the war of 1812 who was caught in the crossfire during the battle of Gettysburg in 1863; after being released from his confederate prison, he promptly arrested the traitorous stragglers and took up his flintlock against the rest.

rRX0d TIL that Harrison Schmitt, an American geologist, retired NASA astronaut, and former U.S. senator, is often credited with capturing the famed photograph of the Earth know as The Blue Marble, and he personally collected rock samples that suggested the moon once processed an active magnetic field.

b9Yga TIL Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is being eaten alive by millions of venomous sea stars known as crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS). Scientist have developed a new robot to hunt and kill these sea stars—a murderous, autonomous underwater vehicle called RangerBot. It kills with a single shot of bile