The next time you hear Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree, or Holly Jolly Christmas, thank Johnny Marks, the Jewish songwriter who gave us many Christmas classics.

ancient Athenian playwright

Stanford bioengineers have developed an ultra-low-cost, human-powered blood centrifuge. With rotational speeds of up to 125,000 revolutions per minute, the device separates blood plasma from red cells in 1.5 minutes, no electricity required.

“Folsom Prison Blues” gave Johnny Cash his first top-10 country hit in 1956, and his live concert performance at Folsom—dramatized memorably in the film Walk

It’s the unpleasant feeling that makes us instinctively scratch and scratch and scratch. So why does a fingernail almost instantly make an itch feel better?

The star of camp sci-fi classic claims the monarch told him she watches it with her grandchildren every Christmas, and asked the actor to recite dialogue

American actress, producer and former model

sauce

Climbing the Mt Everest is reserved for the elite, it requires months of preparation and a lot of money, but once you've succeeded you would have the satisfaction of being at …

United States Army soldier

Once in a while, you hear an old war story that restores your faith in humanity. Usually it involves a moment of quiet in the midst of chaos; some singing or the sharing of a few condiments. But how many of them take place in mid air?

The Battle of Athens (sometimes called the McMinn County War) was a rebellion led by citizens in Athens and Etowah, Tennessee, United States, against the local government in August 1946. The citizens, including some World War II veterans, accused the local…

Wine-making grape

book

"I Will Always Love You" is a song written and originally recorded in 1973 by American singer-songwriter Dolly Parton. Her country version of the track was released in 1974 as a single and was written as a farewell to her former partner and mentor of seven…

The Battle of Xiangyang (traditional Chinese: 襄陽之戰; simplified Chinese: 襄阳之战; pinyin: Xiāngyáng zhizhàn) was a key battle between the invading Mongols of the Yuan dynasty and Chinese Southern Song forces from AD 1267 to 1273. After the battle, the victorious…

Are you perceived to be a pessimist? Blame your genes, for researchers say that some people are genetically programmed to be negative....

Posted in r/todayilearned by u/cbciv • 947 points and 111 comments

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Setting records is hard, and making money from it is even harder. But Guinness has a strategy in place.

CalTech astronomer Fritz Zwicky was the first to conceive of dark matter, supernovas and neutron stars. He also had a theory about colonizing the solar system using nuclear bombs. We could terraform other planets, he argued, by pulverizing them and then moving…