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TIL Canadian Inuk writer Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk never had formal education before she was twenty. In the 1950s, she started writing a novel in Inuktitut syllabics when a missionary asked her to write some sentences in Inuktitut so he could learn the language

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QJ77X TIL in 2005, the US introduced a new $1 coin that you could buy and have shipped for free. people took advantage of this by buying them with a credit card then immediately using the coins to pay their bill to get free airline miles. one man abused this so much that he earned 4 million airline miles
X75k TIL John F Kennedy ordered 1,200 Cuban cigars hours before he authorized a U.S. trade embargo which subsequently made them illegal
lZNr TIL: Due to the detonation of atomic bombs, everything on Earth was marked by a unique carbon signature. It can measure the date of anything from wine to human tissue.
E1MVV TIL researchers made a 3-D virtual chest reconstruction of a 60,000-yr-old male Neanderthal skeleton called "Kebara 2" or “Moshe”. They found that he didn't have a hunched posture but would stand upright with a straight spine; he had a similar-size chest to humans today but greater lung capacity.
wLXv1 TIL that during the opening ceremony of Ottawa international Airport’s new terminal in 1959 a USAF F-104 Starfighter did a supersonic flypast. The resulting sonic boom shattered nearly all the glass in the airport and caused significant structural damage, delaying the opening for another year.