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TIL a good portion of the worlds web traffic encryption is controlled by lava lamps.

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LNjd TIL King John of Bohemia (who was blind) died in battle (where his retainers would lead his horse into the thick of the fighting, where he would then flail his sword around) was reported to have said: “Let it never be the case that a Bohemian king runs [from a fight]!”
M7wrm TIL the US Postal Service's (unofficial) motto, "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers...", comes from Greek historian Herodotus' description of the Achaemenid Persian's Angarium couriers who ran a Pony Express style courier service for their king.
lo507 TIL about 9-year old Robert Douglas Spedden, who in 1915 was one of the first pedestrians killed by a car. Three years earlier he had survived the Titanic sinking.
gMpj4 TIL Amazon Web Services offers a service called Snowmobile, where they will bring you a truck with 100 Petabytes worth of hard drives, copy your data, then drive it to its destination, bypassing the internet entirely. Transferring this much data over a 1Gbps line would take 20 years.
bJEa TIL Bacteria can absorb genetic material from dead bacteria and integrate them into their own genome. So if a bacterium eats the corpse of one which has adapted to colder temperatures, it will gain that resistance to cold as well.