› added 4 years ago

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TIL a Princeton University undergraduate designed an atomic bomb for his term paper. When American nuclear scientists said it would work, the FBI confiscated his paper and classified it. Few months later he was contacted by French and Pakistani officials who offered to buy his design. He got an "A".

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Oon0Y TIL in a study of 640 dream journals conducted by Harvard, psychologists determined the dreams of prisoners in WWII POW camps were less aggressive than the standard male population. Rather than visions of extreme violence, the majority of soldiers dreamed of escape, family, loneliness, and home.
1Mv7 TIL that. in the US, the “we’ll be back after these messages” often seen during kid shows of the ‘70s, '80s, and '90s were mandated by the FCC to help children differentiate between the TV show and commercials.
ADwxB TIL that the presence of a hair growing out of a mole may indicate that the spot is actually healthy and noncancerous.
4P1N TIL in 2012 a 9-year-old boy decided he wanted to help the families of fallen US soldiers. He started a Facebook page and ‘traded up’ his toy soldier into $900 worth of Disney World gift certificates. He then gave the dream holiday to a 2 year-old girl who had lost her father in Afghanistan.
wr58 TIL the X-Files episode ‘Home’ which was about a murderous inbred family was based on a story from Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography where a family introduced him to their quadruple amputee son by pulling him out from under a bed after which he “flopp[ed] around” while they sang and danced.