› added 4 years ago

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TIL: Mistaken for an April Fool's Day joke when declassified in 2004 was a British military program for a nuclear weapon codenamed Brown Bunny. (It was renamed Blue Bunny --then Blue Peacock.) To keep the electronics warm if winter-deployed, a proposal called for using body heat from live chickens.

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d8g1Q TIL that one in every 5,000 babies is born without a butthole. This condition is called “imperforate anus” and the baby has to have one created manually in the hospital. The cause of this is not fully understood but it is believed to be caused by abnormal development of the rectum.
Wyd8 TIL asparagus is a scientifically proven hangover cure
kyRE TIL in 1958, the Chinese captured a US Sidewinder missile just four days after it was introduced into combat when it got stuck in a Chinese jet during a dogfight with Taiwan aircraft. It was reverse-engineered into the Soviet AA-2 Atoll (K-13) missile and used against US planes in Vietnam.
6E4lW TIL that the sun loses about 6 million tons of mass every second due to nuclear fusion and the solar wind. Despite constantly losing large sums of mass, it has only lost roughly 0.05% of its original mass over the last 4.5 billion years.
PYrDL TIL that Github have an archive program, where they physically store almost all influential open-source projects in the Arctic World Archive (AWA), a project similar to the Svalbard Seed Vault. The intention is to aid future historians and technologists for at least a 1000 years.