› added 5 years ago

129

TIL that elevators are held up by 6-8 tension cables, and each individual cable can hold the full load of the elevator by itself.

Read more newyorker.com

via reddit.com

e0N6E TIL that email tracking is achieved by employing a tiny pixel image attached to your email that is invisible to you, but once you open the email, the image is loaded from a server and the server records that data for the tracking service.
7rxDp TIL that a cup of coffee should be 57.8 °C while drinking to minimize hazards and maximize flavour
Qb8M TIL Thomas Jefferson owned a sheep known he called “this abominable animal”. He kept it in front of the White House where it attacked several people and killed a small boy in 1808.
vPaoD TIL of the "Great Smoke Pall" of 1950, a change in the skies from wildfires in Canada. The wildfires weren't well publicized, so there was speculation that the skies changed due to reasons such as secret U.S. military experiments, supernatural forces, and alien invasion.
5V9Qr TIL that Rüppell's griffon vulture has the highest documented altitude of any bird at 36k feet. Unfortunately this information was discovered after a Boeing 747 took the bird into the engine over western Africa.