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TIL Betty white's character, Rose Nyland, on The Golden Girls, had a brush with HIV. The show, titled “72 Hours,” centered on Rose after she learns that a blood transfusion she received may have exposed her to HIV. The message of the show was that HIV and AIDS had the potential to affect anyone.

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e0AoD TIL that the survival rate on the Titanic was 61% for the first-class passengers - but only 23% for the third-class passengers.
YpK8A TIL Charles Joseph Minard was French Civil engineer and pioneer of info-graphics. Minard is famous for his flow graphs, one notably showing the trade of French wine. Information designer Edward Tufte said his map of the French invasion of Russia, "may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn"
ne1xB TIL In 1863, scientists started to doubt that the Sun is actually burning coal and proposed that the heat of the Sun has been kept up by meteoric bodies falling into it. "If the sun were composed of coal, it would last at the present rate only 5,000 years"
VMmyD TIL that since the turn of the century, cockroach populations have plummeted in some former Soviet countries for unknown reasons, with at least one species being proposed for inclusion in lists of threatened fauna
4Wlo TIL of Nancy Wake, a secret agent who served Britain during WW2 and who became the Gestapo’s most wanted person. Her exploits included judo-chopping a man to death, and cycling 310 miles undetected through German territory and checkpoints to replace codes which had been destroyed in a raid.