› added 7 years ago

744

TIL that tennis and basketball courts sometimes develop "dead spots" where the ball doesn't bounce

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via reddit.com

OkK7 TIL soldiers in WWII made simple radios using a razorblade and pencil as the diode, dubbing them Foxhole Radios.
BgaNy TIL: Uranium was named after Uranus, which had only recently been discovered.
okwo TIL machine guns mounted on early propeller aircraft had to be timed to fire bullets through the spinning blades without hitting them
Wk1QB TIL there is a plane that flies above Los Angeles every single day releasing thousands of sterile fruit flies from 2,000ft in the air to combat the invasive Mediterranean Fruit Fly. Up to 125,000 flies per square mile are released each week in what’s called “biological birth control”
OOQ4 TIL Clair Cameron Patterson was counting lead isotopes in rocks to find the age of the earth, after finding the age of the earth he also found out there was unhealthy amounts of lead in the atmosphere caused by tetraethyl lead, Patterson campaigned to stop the use of tetraethyl lead and won in 1978.