› added 11 years ago

146

TIL that Neil Armstrong’s NASA application was a week late. If it weren’t for his friend, Dick Day, secretly slipping it into the pile, he would have been rejected.

Read more blogs.voanews.com

via reddit.com

x6aKk TIL North America was once divided by the great Western Interior Seaway that ranged from the present Artic to Gulf of Mexico beginning around the Mesozoic period (approx. 200 millions years ago +/-) Its why Alberta, a land locked province, has such great fossil deposits.
5VR8 TIL that Nelson Mandela was not taken off the US terror list until 2008
rRxBw TIL that King Edward IV borrowed $348 from Oxford University in 1861. The king paid back $160 but never covered the remaining $224. The debt was forgotten until 1996, when it was rediscovered and calculated to have accumulated to $290 Billion.
XEdEP TIL: There was a book about a famous train leaving King’s Cross Station on a magical adventure, written in 1937 by Doris Crockford (the same name as a witch Harry Potter meets in the first book)
awra9 TIL that if it weren't for the Haber-Bosch process, that which draws nitrogen from the air into plant fertilizer, "almost half the world's population would not be alive today."