› added 7 years ago

146

TIL St Paul’s Cathedral in London can be seen from King Henry’s Mound, 16 km (10 miles) away. No building obstructing this view is allowed to be built by law.

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jND9M TIL that in 2009 Icelandic engineers accidentally drilled into a magma chamber with temperatures up to 1000C (1832F). Instead of abandoning the well like a previous project in Hawaii, they decided to pump water down and became the most powerful geothermal well ever created.
p8Kye TIL that Sagittarius A* - the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way - has a mass 4 million times that of our Sun, but a diameter only 31 times the Sun's. It is so dense that it could fit in the space between the Earth and the Sun, but can attract things 50k light years away.
R7pyw TIL former President Jimmy Carter does not receive federal retirement health benefits because he only worked for the government for four years, less than the five years needed to qualify
D1awD TIL in 1934, Swiss banking secrecy laws were strengthened to encourage Jews of Central & Eastern Europe, fearful of Nazis, to hide their assets in Swiss banks. After a majority of those depositors died during the Holocaust, the laws were used to wrongfully deny their heirs access to those accounts
QJoOX TIL about Marjan the lion, a beloved member of the Kabul Zoo in Afghanistan; he witnessed the country under both Soviet and Taliban occupation and survived multiple artillery strikes on the zoo during the Afghan Civil War as well as being blinded by a grenade. In 2002, he died of old age at 23 years