› added 10 months ago

30

TIL that the village of Westward Ho! is the only place in the British Isles with an exclamation mark in its name

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N7BWe TIL During World War 2, M&Ms were exclusively sold to the US military so soldiers could have chocolate in their rations in tropical climates
DQvYr TIL that in 1869 the poor state of Washington D.C's infrastructure resulted in a proposal to move the US Capital to St. Louis. The proposals failure resulted in Congress approving a large amount of spending to modernize the Nation's Capital
OvNR TIL in 2001, a ten-year-old named Laura Buxton, released a balloon with her name and address in the hope of finding a pen pal. The balloon traveled 140 miles before coming down and was found by an almost-ten-year old also named Laura Buxton. They share a number of other similarities.
4kRko TIL Belgium's "Chocolate Hands" refers to their role in the colonization of the Congo. This included flying Congolese people to Brussels to live in a "human zoo" where spectators would throw bananas at them. They quietly ended this practice in 1958.
VMoA8 TIL NASA conducted a series of arduous tests on 11 deaf men to study the impact of motion sickness on astronauts after discovering that people who became deaf as a result of spinal meningitis didn’t suffer from motion sickness because of the impact of the illness on their inner ear physiology