› added 8 years ago

535

TIL 3 men, Alexei Ananenko, Valeri Bezpalov, and Boris Baranov, sacrificed themselves to save millions of people by diving into the reservoir beneath Chernobyl’s reactor to cease an imminent steam explosion that would’ve turned catastrophe-level accident into a doomsday-level accident.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

5ZwD TIL that the London Underground has evolved its own subspecies of mosquito.
xlP5 TIL: David Tennant fulfilled a pianist’s dying wish by using his skull in a performance of Hamlet.
d8RN9 TIL when IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands died, the Iranian government renamed Winston Churchill Boulevard, the location of the Embassy of the United Kingdom in Tehran, to Bobby Sands Street, prompting the embassy to move its entrance to avoid using Bobby Sands Street on its letterhead.
aeRZ TIL that Billy Joel attempted suicide in 1970. He did it by drinking furniture polish because “It looked tastier than bleach.” He later released a song called “You’re Only Human (Second Wind)” to discourage teenage suicide.
8Bd8 TIL engineers that worked on the Lockheed SR-71 “Blackbird” aircraft couldn’t come up with a proper fuel sealing system that could handle the thermal expansion of the airframe at extreme temperatures, so the aircraft would leak jet fuel on the runway.