› added 8 years ago

342

The numbers tell the story: Of the 648 people killed by lightning in the U.S. from 1995 to 2008, 82 percent were male. And as much as we were hoping to uncover a biological cause—extra iron in the male cranium, perhaps, or the conductive properties of testosterone—it turns out men are... just kind of stupid. “Men take more risks in lightning storms,” says John Jensenius, a lightning safety expert with the National Weather Service.

Read more popsci.com

j6A8j TIL of Thomas “Shang” Draper, a crime lord in late 1800s NYC who ran a prostitution house with removable panels on the walls, making it easy for him and his associates to rob clients.
xbJ1 TIL A man noticed his food going missing so he set up a webcam and found that a woman had been living in his closet for a year
x6kX5 TIL: Failed supernovae are thought to create stellar black holes by the collapsing of a red supergiant star in the early stages of a supernova. When the star can no longer support itself, the core collapses completely, forming a stellar-mass black hole, and consuming the nascent supernova.
ADZea TIL that 3 years after illegally joining the Marines at the age of 14, Jack Lucas snuck onto a ship bound for Iwo Jima, stormed the beach without a rifle, and threw himself on top of two grenades to protect his team. He survived, and is the youngest person to earn the Medal of Honor at 17.
GArgj TIL that the US nun population is rapidly shrinking and aging and that the average sister is 80 years old and by some estimates fewer than 1,000 nuns will left in the United States by 2042.