› added 1 year ago

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TIL that the closest living relatives of the hippo are cetaceans - whales and dolphins

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6EPJm TIL: Bees don't buzz during an eclipse - Using tiny microphones suspended among flowers, researchers recorded the buzzing of bees during the 2017 North American eclipse. The bees were active and noisy right up to the last moments before totality. As totality hit, the bees all went silent in unison.
GYANQ Dumping all our nuclear waste in a volcano does seem like a neat solution for destroying the roughly 29,000 tons of spent uranium fuel rods stockpiled around the world. But there's a critical standard that a volcano would have to meet to properly dispose of the stuff, explains Charlotte Rowe, a volcano geophysicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. And that standard is heat. The lava would have to not only melt the fuel rods but also strip the uranium of its radioactivity.
wo6X6 TIL about Operation Paul Bunyan, where the US cut down a tree in the Korean DMZ as a response to the murder of two officers, deploying over 800 soldiers and air support without any shots fired. The operation left a 19-foot stump as a reminder of the incident.
epW8n TIL that Absinthe is not hallucinogenic as I've been led to believe. Think Kylie, green fairy in Moulin Rouge. This was a lie perpetrated by the wine industry in order to win back their market after a bug decimated the vineyards.
Z8AeB TIL Fred Astaire started skateboarding in his 70's, got a lifetime membership to the Nat'l Skateboard Society, and broke his wrist skateboarding at age 78.