› added 6 years ago

127

TIL while the CIA is by and large the most well know US spy agency, there exist a second equally large American espionage agency called the DIA. The DIA produces approximately one-fourth of all intelligence content that goes into the President's Daily Brief.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

7r7nZ TIL about LIDAR, similar to SONAR and RADAR, this technology bounces light off of the Earth to map features of the land. Even peering through dense forest, it's changing how all sorts of fields of study see the land's topography.
dOEZ TIL that when Ferdinand Magellan prepared to sail around the world in 1519, he spent more money on sherry than on weapons.
wLGyP TIL 22 yr old Hilda Clayton, an Army combat photographer and visual information specialist with 55th Signal Company, captured her last photo, and the moment of her death, when a mortar shell exploded in the launch tube during a training exercise with Afghan soldiers
764x TIL that when Koichi Tanaka of Japan won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2002, he became the first to only have a bachelor’s degree. Tanaka was so unknown that he was on the second-lowest job level at the obscure Shimadzu Corp. The embarrassed scientific-instrument maker immediately promoted Tanaka.
1aNoP TIL magpie birds in Australia regularly swoop-attack cyclists and walkers who get too close to their nests. Thousands of attacks happen annually, mostly a nuisance but also causing hundreds of injuries. In 2018, a toddler sitting in a stroller was almost blinded by a magpie attacking his face.