› added 12 years ago

131

TIL that an Air Canada flight ran out of fuel at 41,000 feet, and was safely landed at an non-operational airfield in Gimli.

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1aJ0O TIL Three cleanup volunteers at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant voluntarily suited up in scuba gear and swam into the radioactive water, knowing that they would die as a result, to open a gate valve allowing containmented water to drain out preventing a catastrophic thermal explosion.
YoXG TIL that New York City in the 70s was known as “Fear City” and a very blunt tourist notice was displayed in order to keep tourists from ending up in dangerous situations.
O1GL TIL that the word “metaphysics” literally means “after physics”. An early editor of Aristotle’s works needed a placeholder name for the untitled philosophical book that came after the the book he called Physics.
K8Wa TIL That Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice and Wonderland, wanted to marry an 11 year old girl named Alice when he was 31.
4kK96 TIL about Mars Direct, a 1989 plan to get humans to Mars within ten years, using just two launches of a large rocket system and utilising local Martian resources