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TIL - Most of the smoke billowing up from a space shuttle launch is not exhaust. It is water vapor from the pool of water under the shuttle designed to absorb the acoustic shock waves that could otherwise tear the shuttle apart.

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8Gjb TIL There is a day in Russia called “Procreation day” Russians are allowed to skip work in order to have sex and if they give birth 9 months later they are rewarded with prizes such as a washing machine.
Wk5k8 TIL about the italian revolutionary Nicola Bombacci. He has been the first italian to meet the Russian Bolsheviks, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party in 1921, and one of the best friends and mentors of Benito Mussolini, with whom he was hanged at the end of WWII.
ge9X TIL a unit of women aviators, known as the Night Witches, in the Soviet Air Force bombed the Germans during WWII by idling their engines and gliding to the bomb release site so that only the wind noise could reveal their position. They did this at night and flew with no parachutes.
NPdQ TIL that Mars’ smallest moon, Deimos, has an escape velocity of 5.2M/S, meaning that if you were take a running jump while on it, you will launch off like a slow rocket.
VMZbk TIL the perfect Japanese pangram (a sentence using every letter of an alphabet once) is not a nonsensical phrase like "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" - It's actually a poem called the Iroha, which is considered so perfect it has provided the ordering of Japanese syllabary since 1079.