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…

British-born American astronomer

This is a story that involves a $1 lottery ticket, a new Cadillac and an incredible amount of stupidity by members of an ostensibly charitable organization who were determined to uphold racist atti…

TIL the writers of 'That '70s Show' theme song get $70 each time the show airs. He refers to it as "That $70 Show".

Wadi Al-Hitan, Whale Valley, in the Western Desert of Egypt, contains invaluable fossil remains of the earliest, and now extinct, suborder of whales, Archaeoceti. These fossils represent one of the major stories of ...

Nagasaki (Japanese: 長崎, "Long Cape") is the capital and the largest city of Nagasaki Prefecture on the island of Kyushu in Japan.

Machu Picchu is a 15th-century Inca citadel, located in the Eastern Cordillera of southern Peru, on a 2,430-metre (7,970 ft) mountain ridge. It is located in the Machupicchu District within Urubamba Province above the Sacred Valley, which is 80 kilometres…

fuel flow restrictor retro-fitted to Merlin engines

Funny and insightful speech from the "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" star.

Happy Birthday actor Mr. T Born: Lawrence Tureaud May 21, 1952 in Chicago, Illinois, USA Quotes: [Playboy magazine – September 1983] I am the best bodyguard, because I’ll take a bullet,…

Former President John F. Kennedy once said, “The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it.”While the families of Ameri

The U.S. Secret Service held a sunrise wreath ceremony Monday to honor Leslie Coffelt — the sole officer in the agency’s history to die protecting a president — who was killed 70 years ago.

"The Front" is the nineteenth episode of The Simpsons' fourth season. It originally aired in the United States on the Fox network on April 15, 1993. In the episode, Bart and Lisa decide to write an episode of The Itchy & Scratchy Show; after their noscript…

For decades, American children have been leaving out cookies and milk for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. But how did this holiday food tradition get started?

Eucalyptus leaves might serve as the gold miner's best friend, with gold drawn from the depths, researchers report, draping the humble gum trees.

I share the story of how American Airlines save $40,000 one olive at a time plus some other cost cutting measures from airlines that will impress.