› added 7 years ago

198

TIL The maternity ward of Dutch princess Juliana (sheltered in Canada during WW2) was declared international territory so that the child would be born in no country and inherit Dutch citizenship. In gratitude, she sent 100,000 tulips paving the way for the Canadian Tulip Festival.

Read more wikipedia.org

via ift.tt

XE0ND TIL: Within a split second, the human nose modifies the moisture of inhaled air to a constant relative humidity of 75%, and the temperature to a constant of 98.6F (even if the air is 40F or 100F)
a4RM TIL in 1995, when looking through the manuscripts of Carl Koller at the Library of Congress, a German historian found a small envelope of cocaine with the note: “Remainder of the first dose with which I made my initial cocaine experiment in 1884”
Ype5W TIL Antarctica was discovered so recently, that the first person to set foot on it was an American citizen.
akeo TIL - Russian Crimean War debt was so large that Alexander II, realizing the difficulty of defending Alaska, decided to sell it to the United States, in 1867
QyM TIL Curiosity’s wheels have a pattern that leaves patterned tracks in the sandy surface of Mars. That pattern is used by on-board cameras to judge the distance traveled. The pattern itself is Morse code for “JPL”