#factoftheday — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #factoftheday, aggregated by home.social.
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The world’s first national election via the Internet was held in Estonia in 2007.
Estonian citizens equipped with an electronic ID-card were able to vote for the national parliament (‘Riigikogu’) and of participating voters, 5.4% used this opportunity.
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The world’s first national election via the Internet was held in Estonia in 2007.
Estonian citizens equipped with an electronic ID-card were able to vote for the national parliament (‘Riigikogu’) and of participating voters, 5.4% used this opportunity.
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“Silicon Saxony” is an area in eastern Germany that is home to Europe’s biggest microelectronics cluster.
Thousands of companies, from startup to multinational, in microelectronics, semiconductors and other high-tech have centered labs and factories around Dresden and Leipzig.
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“Silicon Saxony” is an area in eastern Germany that is home to Europe’s biggest microelectronics cluster.
Thousands of companies, from startup to multinational, in microelectronics, semiconductors and other high-tech have centered labs and factories around Dresden and Leipzig.
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11 April 1954 is calculated to be the most uneventful day of the 20th century.
In 2010, William Tunstall-Pedoe, a computer scientist at Cambridge University, used a computer model to rank historical events by relevance.
Using millions of data points, 11 April 1954 ranked the lowest.
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The Baltic Way was a peaceful political demonstration that occurred on 23 August 1989.
Two million people joined hands to form a human chain spanning 675 km across the three Baltic states Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
At the time, the countries were occupied by the Soviet Union.
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Billund Airport, Denmark’s second largest airport, started off as a private air strip for the neighbouring Lego company.
It started in 1961 as private 800 metre grass runway next to the factory for its executives.
By 1964 it was converted to a 1600 metre paved runway.
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Billund Airport, Denmark’s second largest airport, started off as a private air strip for the neighbouring Lego company.
It started in 1961 as private 800 metre grass runway next to the factory for its executives.
By 1964 it was converted to a 1600 metre paved runway.
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The Free State of Fiume was an independent free state that existed from 1920 to 1924.
Starting off as autonomous Hungarian exclave in 1719, it was annexed by the Kingdom of Italy in 1924, to which it was already connected with a corridor.
The territory currently lies in Croatia.
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The Vatican Railway connecting Vatican City to the Italian railway network is the world’s shortest national rail system.
Only 300 metres of the 1.27 km railway lies inside Vatican City, with a journey time of 30 seconds from the border gates to its only station.
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The Vatican Railway connecting Vatican City to the Italian railway network is the world’s shortest national rail system.
Only 300 metres of the 1.27 km railway lies inside Vatican City, with a journey time of 30 seconds from the border gates to its only station.
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The EU organic logo is compulsory for all pre-packaged organic food produced in the European Union.
It can only be used on products that contain at least 95% organic ingredients and are certified organic by an authorised body.
The remaining 5% requires strict conditions.
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London’s ULEZ is the world’s largest low emission zone.
Expanded to cover 1500 square km in 2023, the Ultra Low Emission Zone charges £12.50 per entry for any car that doesn’t meet the minimum ‘Euro’ emission standards
Cars made after 2005 typically meet these standards.
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London’s ULEZ is the world’s largest low emission zone.
Expanded to cover 1500 square km in 2023, the Ultra Low Emission Zone charges £12.50 per entry for any car that doesn’t meet the minimum ‘Euro’ emission standards
Cars made after 2005 typically meet these standards.
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Swiss luxury watch manufacturer Rolex is wholly owned by a charity.
Rolex SA is a for-profit company headquartered in Geneva but all of the company’s shares are held by Fondation Hans Wilsdorf, a charitable foundation that received all the shares after the founder’s death.
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The world’s first nuclear power station provided its first power to the grid on 27 June 1954 in Obninsk, near Moscow.
The opening of ‘APS-1 Obninsk’ marked a milestone in the peaceful use of nuclear technology and the plant produced power for 48 years.
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On 3 January 2018, as high water coincided with a storm, all five major storm surge gates in the Netherlands were closed simultaneously in a historic first.
With over a quarter of land below sea level, the country has invested heavily in flexible flood defences.
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In January 2004, Georgia reinstated its historical national flag, the “five cross flag”, after a hiatus of 500 years.
Following Georgia’s 1991 independence from the Soviet Union it had become a symbol of national roots, historical identity and the 2003 Rose Revolution.
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The electronic dance music ‘Gabber’ originated in Rotterdam but its name originated in Hebrew.
In Amsterdam slang (Bargoens), ‘gabber’ means ‘close friend’.
It came to Bargoens via Yiddish, which took it from Hebrew and is closely related to the modern Hebrew ‘chaver’ (חבר).
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Empress Zita von Bourbon-Parma, the last empress of the Habsburg dynasty, died in 1989 at the age of 96 in Switzerland.
The wife of Emperor Karl I, the last crowned head of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, she lived most of her live in exile after the empire’s dissolution.
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Empress Zita von Bourbon-Parma, the last empress of the Habsburg dynasty, died in 1989 at the age of 96 in Switzerland.
The wife of Emperor Karl I, the last crowned head of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, she lived most of her live in exile after the empire’s dissolution.
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On 5 July 1946, designer Louis Réard unveiled the bikini, revolutionary and “explosive” new beachwear modelled by Micheline Bernardini at a Parisian swimming pool.
He named the two-piece swimsuit after the Bikini Atoll, where atomic bomb tests had been conducted days earlier.
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A neutron star is so dense that one teaspoon of its material would have a mass over 5,500,000,000 tonnes (5.5 billion), about 900 times the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza (often cited as 5.9 million tons / 5.3 million tonnes). At the extraordinarily high densities of neutron stars, ordinary matter is squeezed to nuclear densities. All of that matter is packed into a radius on the order of 10 kilometers (6 miles).
https://sciencecards.org/what-is-the-density-of-a-neutron-star/
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A neutron star is so dense that one teaspoon of its material would have a mass over 5,500,000,000 tonnes (5.5 billion), about 900 times the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza (often cited as 5.9 million tons / 5.3 million tonnes). At the extraordinarily high densities of neutron stars, ordinary matter is squeezed to nuclear densities. All of that matter is packed into a radius on the order of 10 kilometers (6 miles).
https://sciencecards.org/what-is-the-density-of-a-neutron-star/
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Pelicans have been living in London’s St James’s Park since 1664, when the Russian Ambassador gave a pair of Great White pelicans to King Charles II as a diplomatic gift.
The animals have always been manually replaced because, until June 2026, they never successfully hatched chicks.
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In January 2026, Château de Fontainebleau, a favourite retreat of guillotined French queen Marie-Antoinette, started a project for people to write to her.
Five months later, 4000 people had already written a letter to France’s most famous queen.
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Félicette was a black and white Parisian stray cat that became the first feline in space.
She was launched on 18 October 1963 on board a Véronique AGI 47 rocket as part of the French space programme.
The sub-orbital flight lasted 13 minutes and she was recovered safely.
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The phrase ‘Survival of the fittest’ was not coined by Charles Darwin, as often thought, but by philosopher Herbert Spencer.
Darwin coined ‘Natural selection’; Spencer’s description wrongly suggests that evolution favours those that ‘are the best’, instead of ‘the best adapted’.
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SMINTair (Smokers International Airways) was an airline for smokers proposed in 2006 by German entrepreneur Alexander Schoppmann.
Aimed at business travellers who wanted a smoke on long-haul flights, it didn't raise the €40 million needed to get off the ground.
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Lightning can heat the air it passes through to temperatures of about 30,000 °C (54,000 °F). That is regarded as 5 times hotter than the surface of the sun. The discharge process, or return stroke, of the lightning is the most luminous part where the electric current moves through the channel. One observation found that the rate at which the return stroke current traveled was around 100,000 km/s (or one-third the speed of light).
https://sciencecards.org/what-are-some-interelightning-facts/
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Lightning can heat the air it passes through to temperatures of about 30,000 °C (54,000 °F). That is regarded as 5 times hotter than the surface of the sun. The discharge process, or return stroke, of the lightning is the most luminous part where the electric current moves through the channel. One observation found that the rate at which the return stroke current traveled was around 100,000 km/s (or one-third the speed of light).
https://sciencecards.org/what-are-some-interelightning-facts/
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Nazi Germany’s Dachau concentration camp was opened in March 1933, within eight weeks of Hitler becoming chancellor.
Its first use was to imprison political opponents, mostly Communists, Social Democrats, and other dissidents.
It was liberated 12 years later.
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Nazi Germany’s Dachau concentration camp was opened in March 1933, within eight weeks of Hitler becoming chancellor.
Its first use was to imprison political opponents, mostly Communists, Social Democrats, and other dissidents.
It was liberated 12 years later.
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In the 17th century, Isaac Newton discovered that prisms could split up white light into a spectrum of colors. He also showed that the spectrum could be recombined to recreate white light. Newton was the first to use the word spectrum in describing his experiments. Today we call the band of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to the human eye the visible spectrum. Learn more:
https://sciencecards.org/physics/what-did-newton-discover-with-his-prism-experiments
#science #sciencefacts #factoftheday #physics #stem #noaifacts
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In the 17th century, Isaac Newton discovered that prisms could split up white light into a spectrum of colors. He also showed that the spectrum could be recombined to recreate white light. Newton was the first to use the word spectrum in describing his experiments. Today we call the band of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to the human eye the visible spectrum. Learn more:
https://sciencecards.org/physics/what-did-newton-discover-with-his-prism-experiments
#science #sciencefacts #factoftheday #physics #stem #noaifacts
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Plovdiv in Bulgaria is Europe’s oldest continuously inhabited city.
Founded about 8000 years ago in the Neolithic era, the city has been part of the Odrysian and the Macedon kingdoms, the Roman, the Bulgarian, the Byzantine, and the Ottoman empires and now the Republic of Bulgaria.
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Plovdiv in Bulgaria is Europe’s oldest continuously inhabited city.
Founded about 8000 years ago in the Neolithic era, the city has been part of the Odrysian and the Macedon kingdoms, the Roman, the Bulgarian, the Byzantine, and the Ottoman empires and now the Republic of Bulgaria.
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‘Betteridge’s law of headlines’ states that “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
The law is named after British technology journalist Ian Betteridge, who coined the adage in 2009 stating that it demonstrates the writer is not confident of a yes.
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‘Betteridge’s law of headlines’ states that “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
The law is named after British technology journalist Ian Betteridge, who coined the adage in 2009 stating that it demonstrates the writer is not confident of a yes.
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Neptune's winds in the equatorial region have speeds of around 1,200 km/h (750 mph), with some storm systems having wind speeds that reach up to 2,100 km/h (1,304 mph) making them near-supersonic. For comparison, the fastest wind gust ever recorded on Earth was 408 km/h (253 mph). The average airliner flies at around 500 mph.
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Neptune's winds in the equatorial region have speeds of around 1,200 km/h (750 mph), with some storm systems having wind speeds that reach up to 2,100 km/h (1,304 mph) making them near-supersonic. For comparison, the fastest wind gust ever recorded on Earth was 408 km/h (253 mph). The average airliner flies at around 500 mph.
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At over 4 million tonnes, Romania’s ‘Casa Poporului’ is the world’s heaviest building.
Built in Bucharest as a palace on the instruction of dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, it’s now the world’s largest civilian administration building, though less than half of its space is in actual use.
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Liberland is an unrecognised micronation founded by Czech right-libertarian politician Vít Jedlička.
He asserts a stretch of floodplain on the bank of the Danube went unclaimed during a border dispute between Croatia and Serbia and he claimed it under a ‘terra nullius’ doctrine.
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Helsinki’s Kruunuvuori Bridge opened in April 2026 as the longest bridge in the world built exclusively to serve pedestrians, cyclists and trams.
The 1191 metre long bridge, connecting two parts of Helsinki across the sea, was designed with a service life of 200 years.
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Arkell v. Pressdram (1971) is a famous UK legal anecdote where Private Eye magazine defeated a libel threat from James Arkell.
Private Eye responded to Arkell’s lawyer’s demand with a curt dismissal (“f*** off”), the case never went to court.
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Founded in 1088, the University of Bologna is the world’s oldest university in continuous operation.
Initially set up to study Roman Law, it played a central role in the sciences during the Middle Ages and Italian Renaissance with many prominent alumni and faculty.
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Space is big, really really big. If you do the math, you will find that ~1.4 million Earth’s could fit in a line from the Sun to the Heliopause. It took 35 years for Voyager 1 to reach it.
https://sciencecards.org/space/how-many-earths-can-fit-between-the-sun-and-the-heliopause
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The funeral procession of Józef Piłsudski was the largest public funeral in Poland’s history.
A statesman and pivotal figure in Poland’s independence, Marshal Piłsudski’s funeral procession in Kraków in 1935 was attended by an estimated 300 000 people.
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In 2002 the Czech Republic approved the world’s first national “dark-sky” legislation.
Aimed at limiting light pollution, the law requires outdoor lighting to be shielded or pointed downward to prevent light from travelling up into the sky.
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At 3300 metres above sea level, the Pico de Veleta in southern Spain is home to Europe’s highest road.
Running from the city of Granada to the Sierra Nevada Ski Station, the road is very popular among amateur cyclists and professional cyclists who use it to train.
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The term ‘Cold War’ was first used to describe the geopolitical tension between the Soviet Union and the Western powers in an essay by George Orwell.
His 1945 essay “You and the Atom Bomb”, after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, speculates about an atomic age.
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Lada cars were originally called Zhiguli (Жигули), after a mountain range in Russia, but when they started exporting them, someone realized "Zhiguli" sounds a lot like "gigolo", so they changed it.
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The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts datacentre in Bologna houses the world’s most powerful weather supercomputer.
Its “Integrated Forecast System”, running on four computing clusters, is considered the world’s most accurate weather forecasting model.
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Gold’s color comes from Einstein’s relativity: gold’s electrons move near light speed, increasing their mass and shrinking their orbitals. This shifts absorbed/reflected light wavelengths, giving gold its hue.
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Bees visit approximately 2 million flowers to collect enough nectar to produce 1 pound (about 0.45 kg) of honey. Pollinators like bees help maintain plant diversity, which is critical for healthy ecosystems.
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An adult human has 10 quadrillion mitochondria that produce approximately 100 watts of power at rest—enough to power an incandescent light bulb continuously.
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The Republic of Cospaia was a small microstate, in what is now Italy, that was independent from 1440 to 1826.
It unexpectedly gained independence in 1440 after a pope sold territory to the Republic of Florence and a small strip of land went unmentioned in the sale.
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Octopuses have three hearts: two pump blood through their gills, and one circulates it to the body. Their unique circulatory system shows how evolution doesn't follow a single blueprint.
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Homeostasis is a critical process that keeps most of your vital organs at 37°C, ensuring biochemical processes run efficiently. Even a 2°C shift in temperature could disrupt function dangerously.
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When Sweden plays football against Denmark, the first 3 letters of “Sweden” and “Denmark” spell out “SWE-DEN”.
The remaining letters spell out “DEN-MARK”.