til - kbin.life

Great story about a small Danish town that helped rescue Jews during World War Two (www.bbc.com)

TIL that the only part of the UK that officially speaks English is Northern Ireland. (populationdata.org.uk)

Surprisingly, there is no law declaring English the official language of the UK....

TIL - After World War II, thousands of Nazis fled to South America along so-called ratlines — often with the help of Catholic clergy (www.dw.com)

Study finds SARS-CoV-2-associated sepsis was more common, deadly than previously thought (medicalxpress.com)

The colour of the Sun is white (www.wtamu.edu)

The sun is not yellow or orange as we see in books and movies. It emits all the colours in the visible spectrum (also in other spectrums as well) making it white!

TIL Chinese astronauts are called taikonauts

I thought that the distinction existed only between Americans (astronauts) and Russians (cosmonauts), but no, Chinese also have their own term. I guess Indians should come up with their own, as well =)

TIL they somehow convinced Kurt Vonnegut to make a very brief appearance in a coffee commercial (www.youtube.com)

The entire commercial is hilariously weird. I don’t think Heart primarily used coffee to keep themselves going when mixing their album....

TIL Minimum wage has only increased by $7.00 in 85 years in the USA.

Upon inception it was set at $0.25. It is now $7.25.

TIL the history behind the "space melody".

You may know it as Space Melody by Luna Park or as ResuRection by ППК (English: PPK), but the original melody was composed by Eduard Artemyev for the 1979 Soviet film Siberiade. The original name of the song, as titled in the movie’s soundtrack release, is la mort du héroes (the death of heroes, if my French is correct)....

TIL past psilocybin use is strongly associated with working less overtime hours (www.tandfonline.com)

TIL: In the song DARE it's "you've got to press it on you" rather than "you've got depression on you" (genius.com)

TIL Children as young as eight can and have been put on the sex offender registry, which lasts the rest of their lives. (jlc.org)

TIL that in the US, liberal adolescents are much more likely to experience depression than their conservative counterparts. This divergence in depression rates only started recently and is growing (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

TIL: Wikipedia.org has over 6.7 million English articles, and close to 60 million total wiki pages (en.wikipedia.org)

TIL of the Mobile phone throwing competition that originated in Finland (en.wikipedia.org)

TIL In the Hot Coffee lawsuit against McDonalds,punitive damages were given due to McDonalds intentionally overheating coffee to save money on refills (www.poolelg.com)

During the trial it was revealed that McDonald’s knew that heating their coffee to this temperature would be dangerous, but they did it anyways because it would save them money. When you serve coffee that is too hot to drink, it will take much longer for a person to drink their coffee, which means that McDonald’s will not...

TIL Why giraffes have patches (pursuit.unimelb.edu.au)

TIL: The CDC estimates that 5 percent of all hospital admissions result in a healthcare-associated infection, culminating in approximately 722,000 infections and 75,000 deaths each year (epi.dph.ncdhhs.gov)

TIL There was a monument in Georgia that gives instructions in 8 languages on how to rebuild society after an apocalyptic event, while also functioning as a compass, calendar, and clock.

TIL that player behaviors to a software bug that created a pandemic in World of Warcraft had similarities to COVID-19 in the real world (en.wikipedia.org)

… researchers noted the similarities between the game and the real-world pandemics. Both had an immediate impact on dense urban areas, which limited the effectiveness of containment procedures in stopping the spread of disease, while air travel, like fast travel, allowed infections to spread across large parts of the world...

TIL Legionnaires' disease (form of walking pneumonia) got its name from an outbreak at an American Legion convention (99percentinvisible.org)

TIL about Moonbow: Nature's Rare and Beautiful Phenomenon Similar to Rainbow (upload.wikimedia.org)

A moonbow is a rare and stunning natural phenomenon that occurs when moonlight is refracted and reflected off water droplets in the air, creating a colorful arc of light in the night sky. Similar to a rainbow, moonbows are formed when light is dispersed into its various colors, but they are much rarer and more elusive, as they...

TIL that The Smallest Computer in the World Fits On a Grain of Rice (ece.engin.umich.edu)

TIL the adjective 'daily' in the lord's prayer is actually written in the original Greek as epiousion, which occurs nowhere else in known history (en.wikipedia.org)

the full line being “Give us today our epiousion bread”...