› added 6 years ago

153

TIL of the loudest plane ever built, the XF-84H Thunderstreak. At idle power, the propeller would create continuous sonic booms that emitted visible shock waves. Anyone nearby, regardless of ear protection, suffered severe nausea, headaches, and it even caused one man to have a seizure.

KOMjQ TIL in 2005 the word "Mate" was banned in the Australian Federal Parliament. The ban was revoked within 24 hours.
GYyPG TIL that During the 1990s, Raul Cano, a microbiologist at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, revived yeast trapped in amber for 25 million years. Cano went on to found a brewery and crafted an "amber ale" with a 45-million-year-old variant of Saccharomyces cerevisiae.
oRvK8 TIL that some species of flatworms fence with their dual headed penis to determine who becomes the female. The loser (the one that gets inseminated) becomes the female and preduces the eggs (costs a lot of energy)
V50k TIL Marie Curie, a Polish radium physicist in the 20th century was exposed to so much radiation during her life that her notebooks must be kept in lead-lined boxes. They will still be dangerously radioactive for another 1,500+ years.
9yPr TIL that an Orca killed a Great White Shark near California’s Farallon Islands in 2000. The smell of the dead shark’s carcass caused all nearby great whites to vanish. A great white with a satellite tag in the area was seen to immediately dive to a depth of 500 meters and then swam to Hawaii.