› added 7 years ago

140

TIL there is a copy of the Qur'an written in Saddam Hussein's blood which he had commissioned for his 60th birthday. Over the course of 2 years he provided up to 57 pints of his blood to complete the 336,000+ words that make up the text

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

vPyER TIL that on dry, cloudless nights in the desert, water can freeze at temperatures as high as 41 degrees Fahrenheit, 5 Celsius. This is due to a process referred to as or "Night Sky Cooling" or "Radiative Cooling", and allowed desert dwellers to regularly make ice more than 2000 years ago.
pYBx4 TIL about the bald-hairy pattern: a consistent pattern in which bald rulers of Russ|a are always replaced by hairy ones, and vice versa.
gkdb TIL in Aug 1914 the Frank Lloyd Wright’s estate in WI was set on fire by a male servant. The servant then killed Wright’s mistress Mamah Cheney, her 2 children and 4 estate workers with an axe. Afterwards he drank muriatic acid but was caught and died in jail 7 weeks later from self starvation.
l7861 TIL about the Black Terror, a Union Ironclad responsible for the destruction of an enemy ship. The Black Terror was also completely fake, and cost $8.63 to construct.
GYakG TIL Without Quantum mechanics, we couldn't understand why the Sun shines. Quantum tunnelling allows the atoms to spontaneously overcome the electromagnetic repulsion between positively charged protons and produce the nuclear fusion, something the heat and pressure at the Sun core can't do at his own