› added 7 years ago

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TIL of Low Background Steel, steel produced in pre-nuclear ages, which is the only kind of steel that works for various medical and scientifical equipment, since the post-nuclear steel is contaminated by radiation.

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X0Xgj TIL that Comet Swift-Tuttle is the largest comet to make repeated close approaches to Earth. A collision would release 27 times the energy of the impact that caused the extinction of dinosaurs. It has been described as "the single most dangerous object known to humanity".
Brn6D TIL that summer in Japan is considered the season for ghost stories/spooky events and has the same eerie resonance as Halloween does for the U.S. The tradition comes from the Buddhist festival of the dead (Obon) which takes place in summer.
9wxGr TIL: Engineers were given 10 weeks to develop the GBU-28 bunker buster to penetrate Saddam's troops which were buried 30-50 feet deep. In testing the weapon managed to bury itself over 100 feet deep, so deep that the expense in digging it up could not be justified and was deployed immediately after.
QZRa TIL Cunningham’s Law which states, “The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, but to post the wrong answer.”
7r4bX TIL A Scottish biologist Alexander Fleming took an August vacation from his work in the lab investigating staph. Upon his return on Sept. 3, 1928, the scientist found a strange fungus on a culture he had left in his lab—a fungus that had killed off all surrounding bacteria in the culture.