› added 10 years ago

96

TIL the word Saudade, a Portuguese word with no English translation, means the empty sadness and longing for that which may never return that accompanies nostalgia.

X0DDj TIL during the Apollo 16 lunar mission in 1972, the crew brought a lunar rock first collected by Apollo 12 in 1969 BACK to the moon as part of a magnetic field experiment. The rock ended up travelling back and forth between moon and Earth twice.
a8PKL TIL The Vatican Observatory is one of the oldest active astronomical observatories in the world, with its roots going back to 1582 The Jesuit astronomers have contributed to discoveries in many fields from the origins of our solar system to the structure of galaxies.
DQmlp TIL of Operation Mount Hope III, where the U.S. 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment captured an abandoned Soviet Mi-25 Hind D attack helicopter from an abandoned airfield in Libya by hoisting it out with a Chinook and flying 1,700km both ways. They were completely undetected in their mission.
QNE7d TIL Freshwater snails are one of the world's most deadly animals because they transmit the organism that causes schistosomiasis (aka bilharzia), which is, in and of itself, one of the most deadly parasites on the planet! Nearly 230m people were infected in 2014 and there are~200,000 deaths annually.
MelP0 TIL about Mohamed Bishr, an Egyptian man who was repeatedly kidnapped by gangs who planned to use him as a Saddam Hussein lookalike in porn films. The gangs had planned to pass the films off as "found footage" and sell them to international media.