› added 13 years ago

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TIL The oldest parachute design appears in an anonymous manuscript from 1470s Renaissance Italy (over 400 years before the airplane), showing a free-hanging man clutching a cross bar frame attached to a conical canopy. As a safety measure, four straps run from the ends of the rods to a waist belt.

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DZmD TIL in an experiment every one of 54 undergraduates in wine making and tasting thought they were tasting a red wine while it was actually a dyed white wine. Furthermore when comparing identical wine of different prices experts raved about the expensive wine while panning the cheap wine
9wdoD TIL that The Winstons, the soul group who created the most sampled music track in history, received no royalties for their famous drum sample (used by groups such as Oasis). Gregory Coleman, the drummer who performed in the sample, died homeless and destitute in 2006
x64xg TIL The Bacterial Flagellum is a naturally occurring motor that spins up to 100,000 rpm with nearly 100% efficiency and can reverse its rotational direction in milliseconds
KdV6 TIL Bill Clinton gave the 1994 State of the Union Address completely from memory. When he saw the wrong speech had been uploaded to the teleprompter, he quickly recovered and said “I’m not at all sure what speech is in the teleprompter tonight, but I hope we can talk about the State of the Union.”
VMWVQ TIL around 15% of active Twitter accounts are social bots. This means there are nearly 48 million accounts that are not controlled by humans.