› added 2 years ago

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TIL about Marshall Applewhite, the leader of the Heaven's Gate cult, who falsely believed, along with his followers, that a spacecraft was located behind the Hale-Bopp Comet when it passed by Earth in 1997.

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via reddit.com

JYj5V TIL Shin-kicking is a sport in England in which two participants kick each other in the shin until one of them falls.
yQnkX TIL spaghetti almost invariably breaks into more than two pieces. It required a team of scientists, including a MIT mathematician, to figure out how to reliably snap spaghetti into just two pieces
WkONN TIL that Ricky Gervais was the lead singer of a new wave pop duo in the 1980s called Seona Dancing.
1aO6r TIL researchers found naturally occurring lithium in the water supply lowered suicide rates. They were able to measure lithium levels in 27 Texas counties and show those with more lithium in their water had fewer suicides. Similar studies in Greece, Austria, & Japan corroborated the results.
WkpKY TIL the word quarantine comes from an Italian variant 'quaranta giorni', meaning forty days, the period that all ships were required to be isolated before passengers and crew could go ashore during the Black Death plague epidemic.