› added 8 months ago

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TIL Stanford University rejected 69% of the applicants with a perfect SAT score between 2008-2013.

Read more stanfordmag.org

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LXlQ TIL in Ireland, they leave Guinness out for Santa on Christmas Eve
p8g1e TIL in 1998, a minister who was using a .357-caliber Magnum to compare sin to Russian roulette died five days after shooting himself in the head with a blank round and shattering his skull in front of several hundred parishioners, including his family.
0K45 TIL that the “Atari Shuffle” was a trick used to get free plays from early coin-op arcade games. The trick involved players shuffling their feet to build a static charge, which could then be used to zap the machine into giving them a free game. (Referenced at 1:02)
0wjbj TIL light can propel spacecraft. Solar sails use radiation pressure exerted by sunlight to propel themselves in space, absorbing the momentum from incoming photons. Such technology has been theorized since the 1980s, and came true in 2010 with IKAROS, a small satellite.
Z0bY TIL Most life on Earth used to be purple instead of green