› added 11 years ago

59

TIL that in 1972, NASA had a highly successful rocket that qualified for a manned Mars mission. It was canceled.

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jRrQ TIL the World’s Smallest Guitar is the Size of a Red Blood Cell.
eJe6 TIL that Nixon didn’t want pigeon poop along the path to his inauguration, so he had $13,000 of a chemical bird repellent sprayed on trees around the area. It turned out the spray was toxic, and instead of pigeon poop, Nixon had dead pigeons lining the path to his inauguration.
RBp4 TIL an Australian man typed every number from 1 to 1,000,000 in words, not numbers, on his typewriter. It took him 16 years.
0woyL TIL a Princeton University undergraduate designed an atomic bomb for his term paper. When American nuclear scientists said it would work, the FBI confiscated his paper and classified it. Few months later he was contacted by French and Pakistani officials who offered to buy his design. He got an "A".
woAL6 TIL Yellowstone’s famed thermal pools can melt flesh and bone. In 2016, a tourist illegally searching for a swimmable hot spring fell into a portion of the Norris Geyser Basin, where his body was dissolved by the boiling, highly acidic water. His wallet and shoes were all that remained of him.