Recent comments in /f/todayilearned

darwin-rover t1_je77prn wrote

Reply to TIL Early drones were developed during the First World War. These radio controlled planes were primarily for target practice but by 1942 a drone with a built in TV camera was capable of delivering a torpedo to a ship 20 miles from the controller. by jamescookenotthatone

Marilyn Monroe was discovered while she was working in a drone factory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Monroe#1944%E2%80%931948:_Modeling_and_first_film_roles

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Gee-Oh1 t1_je76ror wrote

Reply to TIL that Mattiedna Johnson, born to Mississippi sharecroppers in 1918, used techniques she’d used to make things like butter, jam and soap on her childhood farm to develop techniques to capture and preserve molds for research that eventually helped in the development of drugs to fight scarlet fever. by RedditPrat

I am a mycologist and worked several years in a environmental testing company, phase I and II environmental assessment and indoor air quality. It is amazing easy to collect fungal spores. Our field technicians would sample surfaces with nothing but cotton swabs individually held in sterile sealable tubes. All I had to do is wipe the cotton swabs onto agar plates...wait 5 to 7 days, the usual time for the imperfect fungus to begin sporilating, so I could identify them.

Oxytetracycline was discovered in soil samples near Pfizer's labs in 1950. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytetracycline And it is produced by the fungus Streptomyces rimosus. I have seen this fungus before and its conidia are unremarkable, they are small hyloid ovoids in a string that sequentially bud from the end of the hypha.

Her description of the conidia as "terrible mice" doesn't make sense. Rather it sounds like another fairly common fungus I've seen before that is not a source of any antibiotic.

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Marconidas t1_je73kip wrote

Reply to TIL: The outflow from Amazon River could fill 83 Olympic sized swimming pools per second. by the_ballmer_peak

Ironically, it is the least used drainage basin of the South American continent. More outflow and more length is good ... up until certain point. And the Amazon River far exceeds the optimal gains. There is simply so much water in the basin that it disturbs the idea of putting bridges or anything over the river. The river is so massive and with a heavy rainforest nearby that using it for commercial purposes for industrial usage is hard. Channeling it for agriculture is also not useful because there is so much rain in the region that the floodplain is not fertile due to extreme natural leaching, making it useless.

You would think that having a bigger river would develop the region more, but the Amazon region is the least economically developed in Brazil, and most countries with rivers that drain into the Amazon River have also failed to economically develop.

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TheDefected t1_je733mp wrote

Reply to TIL the majority of ancient Greeks and Romans that were literate read out loud. Reasons for this include a lack of space between letters and no formalized system of punctuation that helped with pauses in reading. by Ask_Me_If_Im_A_Horse

There is a British TV show called Q.I, where they'll often deal with curious facts.
One episode did mention this, involving what was so unusual about a monk reading in silence.
I believe that was somehow noted as being unusual (since they had vows of silence) and it could then be deduced that if that was thought of as unusual, that means speaking when reading was the norm.

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hoarder59 t1_je72cxp wrote

Reply to comment by CulturedClub in TIL that children born earlier in the academic year have a higher chance of participating in upper echelons of sports or academia. This is known as the Relative Age Effect. by ThatFaultyGamer

No, but the average age would be older per grade. I was the youngest, on the younger age of the average. If I waited a year I would have been the oldest, older than the average but receiving the same instruction. I was the best reader/writer but the least social. In sports, where it really matters is the growth of a child. Go to hockeydb.com and look at the birthdate of professional hockey players. The overwhelming majority were born in the first 3 months of the year. Kids start hockey by age group. There is some adjustment for skill, but older kids aren't moved downand only the very top talents move up.

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kelldricked t1_je71p1e wrote

Reply to comment by Psych_Crisis in TIL the SL-1 was the only reactor accident in U.S. history which resulted in immediate fatalities, killing 3 military operators in 1961, pinning one of them to the ceiling. by rigorousthinker

Its millitary? Oh damm we dont come near that shit. But yeah i suspect that in america graves are cheaper and are protected longer because you have more space and less people died (who wanted to be burried) for each square meter.

We would probaly half a big part of proper land meant for housing wasted if we would protect graves for ever. 50 years seems short but its often when the family itself stops caring. Which for a expensive grave is probaly pretty fast.

(When was the last time your grandfather went to the graveyard and visit the grave of their grandfathers?

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IAm_NotACrook t1_je6wpk7 wrote

Reply to comment by Lurker_IV in TIL The oldest musical instrument in the world, a 60,000-year-old Neanderthal flute, is made from the left thighbone of a young cave bear. by gonejahman

> They had bigger brains than us so they were probably smarter.

I don’t know if that tracks. Like dolphins have bigger brains than us but I don’t think a dolphin is as smart as us, despite being extremely intelligent in their own right.

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ambulancisto t1_je6w6q7 wrote

Reply to comment by JetScootr in TIL Early drones were developed during the First World War. These radio controlled planes were primarily for target practice but by 1942 a drone with a built in TV camera was capable of delivering a torpedo to a ship 20 miles from the controller. by jamescookenotthatone

What's amazing is that there were drones that could be piloted with TV. TV was in its infancy. I know the Germans had some TV guided missiles, but talk about bleeding edge tech for the early 1940s...

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