› added 9 months ago

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TIL I learned of a gamma ray burst that struck earth with such intensity it had the same effects as a powerful solar flair. The source of the burst was over two billion light years away.

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9nvG TIL the largest plane to ever successfully land and take off from an aircraft carrier was a C-130 named “Look Ma, No Hook” to brag about how it needed neither an arresting hook nor a catapult assist.
Y70Er TIL the Pittsburgh refrigerator cat was a mythical breed of cat claimed to lived in refrigerated warehouses at the turn of the century
EdjP TIL that a 2005 study found that the scores of “wine experts” are essentially meaningless, revealing that a typical judge’s scoring of a wine varied by plus/minus four points over three blind tastings poured from the same bottle.
jNjXj RemoveDebris, a small experimental satellite designed to clean up space debris successfully snared its first piece of extraterrestrial pollution — a solar system premiere. Did you know that more than 7,600 tonnes of so-called "space junk" floats around Earth — the result of nearly 60 years of space exploration — with some moving faster than a speeding bullet at approximately 48,000 kilometres per hour (30,000 miles per hour).
N7EN6 TIL after the international ban on elephant ivory trade in 1990, China has been sourcing ivory from the fossils of mammoths in the melting permafrost of the Russian Arctic.