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TIL Mozart wrote music for an instrument made of glass bowls that Benjamin Franklin helped create

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MYlW TIL For over three years a poor, illiterate Peruvian farmworker Maxima Acuña de Chaupe withstood violent eviction attempts, beatings and a legal battle to allow Colorado’s Newmont Mining Corporation to turn her land into an open-pit gold mine.
Wk79o From powering airplanes to replacing nuclear energy, algae has been touted as a green energy miracle. So if our waterways are already filled with the stuff, why isn’t it filling the world’s skies with biofueled planes? Algae is a tricky creature that presents a lot of challenges and misconceptions. Here’s why it’s difficult to harness—and why it could big a big payoff.
OA41 TIL ~900 Germans from the town of Demmin committed suicide in panic of the advancing Red Army. Mothers walked into rivers with a rock in a backpack and their babies in their arms. One man shot three young children, then their mothers, then his wife, then himself, but survived as a blind man.
4rKX TIL Paul Boyd, the animator of the show “Ed, Edd, n’ Eddy” was shot dead by a police officer because he (Paul) was having a breakdown related to his bipolar disorder
neRkP TIL that an acoustic piano has a tension string of almost 20 tons, because it has over 230 strings, and each string is under a tension of almost 90 kg (do the math). Because of this the piano is so heavy: because its iron-cast frame to withstand that tension.