› added 3 years ago

244

TIL that the reason older people's houses have a weird, distinct odor to them is because of chemicals from the skin glands getting broken down into small odorous molecules that waft into the air.

Read more mentalfloss.com

via reddit.com

90XD TIL Hugh Thompson (who saved numerous Vietnamese civilians during the My Lai massacre) suffered from PTSD, alcoholism, divorce, and severe nightmare disorder as a result of testifying against those responsible for the massacre.
awP7y TIL of Aarne-Thompson–Uther Index, a catalogue of folktale types used in folklore studies, dividing tales into sections with an AT number for each entry, with the same tale type number referred to by its central motif or the variant folktales of that type, and related tales were grouped together
kJLB7 TIL the 7.9 magnitude 1906 San Francisco earthquake was not even the strongest or deadliest earthquake that year. Two 8.0+ magnitude earthquakes occured in Alaska and Chile on August 17, 1906 within 30 minutes of each other, the Chile one killing 3,882 people.
QJw6X TIL about Rubble Woman, who, in the aftermath of World War II, helped clear and reconstruct the bombed cities of Germany and Austria. With much of the male population dead or prisoners of war, this monumental task fell to a large degree on women.
4Xd4J TIL "red telephone", a direct line between DC and Moscow, isn't really a phone line and no phones were ever used. It went from teletype to fax machines. Since 2008, it's a secure form of email.