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TIL that in the early 20th century, giving birth at hospital was more dangerous than at home. Reasons appareantly include doctors not washing hands (gentelmen have clean hands), being undertrained and overusing unnecessary (and harmful) procedures just to look cooler than midwifes.

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Y7P6v TIL Antonie van Leeuwenhoek handcrafted his microscopes using secret methods. They had powers of magnification ranging from 50 to 300x and the instrument he made in 1677 was powerful enough to see sperm
DQY8D TIL about the SS Île de France, the last civilian ship to leave France before the outbreak of WWII. It successfully transported 1,777 passengers fleeing from France to New York; while crossing the Atlantic, 16 other vessels were sunk by torpedoes, mines, or gunfire.
RGQ8 TIL shortly before she died, Majel Barrett recorded an entire library of phonetic sounds, allowing her voice to be used in future products outside of Star Trek and, quite possibly, as the computer voice in Star Trek: Discovery. Thus, she could live on as the voice of Starfleet possibly for all time.
E1RVX TIL that the 1971 Italian Grand Prix was the closest Formula 1 race ever - the winner was 0.01 seconds ahead of the runner-up, the 5th-place driver was only 0.61 seconds behind the winner, and the lead changed 26 times, with 8 different drivers holding the lead at some stage
p8Xr8 TIL about the arrow of time paradox. Events at the microscopic level are time-symmetric, meaning that if time were symmetrical, a video of those events would seem realistic whether played forwards or backwards. But this isn't the case at the macroscopic level. There is no good explanation for this.