TIL after discovering his hotel alias, Michael Jackson used to prank call Russell Crowe and say things like "'Is Mr. Wall there? Is Mrs. Wall there? Are there any Walls there? Then what's holding the roof up?"

Anshe Chung, the virtual land baroness that I highlighted in my cover story earlier this year, My Virtual Life, has apparently become the first millionaire in Second Life. That's millionaire in real U.S. dollars. Her real-world persona, Ailin Graef,...

When Armstrong again looked outside, he saw that the computer's landing target was in a boulder-strewn area just north and east of a 300-meter (980 ft) diameter crater (later determined to be West crater, named for its location in the western part of the originally planned landing ellipse). Armstrong took semi-automatic control[25] and, with Aldrin calling out altitude and velocity data, landed at 20:17:40 UTC on July 20 with about 25 seconds of fuel left

TIL that spiders can simply cast out strands of silk that capture the wind to "fly" away.

The supermassive black hole is located inside the galaxy NGC 1277 in the constellation Perseus.

Hungry Jack's Pty Ltd is the exclusive Australian master fast food franchise of Burger King Corporation. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Competitive Foods Australia, a privately held company owned by Jack Cowin. Hungry Jack's currently owns and operates or sub-licenses all of the Burger King/Hungry Jack's restaurants in Australia. As the master franchise for the continent, the company is responsible for licensing new operators, opening its own stores and performing standards oversight of...

Learn more about Marie Curie here, including some surprising facts. Marie Curie was the most famous woman scientist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She played a key role in the discovery of radioactivity and its properties, and won two Nobel prizes for her work.

TIL Swedish millionaire Johan Eliasch purchased 400,000 acres of the Amazon Rainforest from a logging company for $14,000,000 for the sole purpose of its preservation.

TIL that after needing 13 liters of blood for a surgery at the age of 13, a man named James Harrison pledged to donate blood once he turned 18. It was discovered that his blood contained a rare antigen which cured Rhesus disease. He has donated blood a record 1,000 times and saved 2,000,000 lives.

For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine. Unseen and unknown, he lived in secret, creeping into homes in the dead of night and surviving on what he could steal. To the spooked locals, he became a legend—or maybe a myth. They wondered how he could possibly be real. Until one day last year, the hermit came out of the forest

TIL of a Malawian teenager who taught himself how to build a windmill out of junk and bring power to his village. He then went on to build a second, larger windmill to power irrigation pumps. He did this all from books he read in the library.

TIL most Japanese schools do not employ janitors or custodians. The Japanese education system believes that requiring students to clean the school themselves teaches respect, responsibility, and emphasizes equality.

TIL During the Black Death, incoming ships were forced to wait for 40 days to prevent possible infection. The Italian word for 40, "quaranta", is where we get the word "quarantine".

If Target Corp.