› added 4 years ago

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TIL sperm whales got their name from late 18th century commercial whalers who discovered the enormous white fluid-filled organ in the whale's head and misinterpret it for sperm fluid. This organ which is now called the spermaceti organ is actually used as a powerful echolocation equipment.

wLEwY TIL that Willmer “Little Axe” Broadnax, a Gospel quartet tenor popular in the 1930s & 40s, was discovered upon his death in 1992 to be a transgender man—something only he and his brother had known.
rdww TIL James Franco got a “D” in his acting class while he was filming 127 Hours, the film he was nominated for an Oscar for. It has been claimed either his acting professor was jealous, or that he had too many absent days to complete the course.
VMoKB TIL there is a supermassive void in space called the Boötes void and if the Milky Way had been in the center of the void, we wouldn't have known there were other galaxies until the 1960s. The void is 0.27% the width of the entire observable universe.
ygNl TIL that Dr. Sanduk Ruit (born to uneducated parents in a poor family) of Nepal devised a cheap but effective cataract treatment procedure that cut the cost by 90%. He has successfully treated over 100,000 people across developing world including North Korea.
XyNR TIL that a man flew three times on the Space Shuttle without being an astronaut. Charles Walker got turned down by NASA but found a space-related job at McDonnell Douglas. McDonnell Douglas paid NASA $40,000 per flight for Walker to operate its experiments on the shuttle as a payload specialist.