› added 11 years ago

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TIL: Widely publicized testimony given in 1990 claiming Iraqi soldiers took babies out of incubators and left them to die is today admitted to be false and has largely come to be regarded as wartime propaganda.

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nako TIL that a ‘micromort’ is a unit given to the amount of times a person will die out of a million tries (for example, going skydiving is 7 micromorts, meaning that there is a 7/1,000,000 chance that a person will die after a trip)
bBXj TIL the Soviets space program didn’t only put the first man in space, but also the first women, space station, space rover and had the first (unmanned) soft landing on any body other than earth
rRLnd TIL of Turner D. Century, a Marvel villain motivated by a hatred of post-WW1 social changes. His gadgets include a flame-throwing umbrella, a flying tandem bicycle, and a "time horn" that induces unconciousness in those under the age of 65. He was killed after only three appearances.
06RR TIL Iceland overthrew their government and rewrote their constitution after the 2008 financial crisis.
mxyxR TIL that one of the attempts to find El Dorado, the mythical city of gold, involved draining a lake using a bucket chain of laborers. Over three months, the lake level fell 3 meters and only recovered about $100K worth of gold.