› added 7 years ago

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TIL that the Portuguese man of war isn’t actually a jellyfish. It’s called a siphonophore, made up of several specialized organisms of the same species. They each perform different functions and can’t survive alone.

jNQEX TIL Dorothea Lange, famous depression era photographer, documented the internment of Japanese-Americans in 1942. The unflattering photos were quietly deposited into the National Archives, where they remained largely unseen until 2006.
dDm8B TIL the last elementary particle that we know to exist was discovered in 2012 at the CERN in Switzerland, using the Large Hadron Collider. It's called the Higgs boson and it's the particle responsible for "assigning" a mass to other elementary particles.
nWplW TIL that on 9/11 a 5th airliner was presumed to be hijacked because the pilot changed the squawk code to 7500, which indicated a hijacking. Despite being a mistake, the airliner was diverted to Canada and was escorted there by US F-15s.
yQNRp TIL That a mountaineer found a wallet in the Andes mountain range that belonged to passenger of the plane crash in 1972. Realising the owner had survived, the mountaineer returned in wallet to him in 2005, more than 30 years later.
5Yl0r TIL in 2016, a Spanish train conductor requested the company he worked for to send someone to relieve him at the end of his shift. When the company failed to do so, the conductor had the train stop in a village and simply went home, leaving 109 passengers stranded.