› added 7 years ago

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TIL in 1976, the team studying a newly-identified virus in Africa didn't want to name it after the village where it was found, so they named it after the closest river they could see on a map, which was the Ebola River.

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8aAgP TIL Less than a year before Ernest Hemingway killed himself with a shotgun, he became paranoid and thought the FBI was following him. It later turned out that head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, had, in fact, gotten an agent to watch Hemingway in Havana, Cuba, in the 1950s.
PYLaL TIL in 2004, Sylvia Browne, a psychic, told the mother of a Cleveland kidnapping victim (Amanda Berry) on the Montel Williams Show her daughter was dead. In 2006, the mother passed away without ever knowing her daughter was still alive and being held captive.
69XPw TIL that after John III Sobieski of Poland-Lithuania defeated the Ottomans at the Battle of Vienna in 1683, the Kangxi Emperor of Qing China wrote an eulogy praising the Polish king. John III Sobieski later sent a portrait of himself to Kangxi.
wL0oE TIL People with lazy eye (amblyopia) are not lazy but they can’t control the way their eyes work. Common in children, it develops when there’s a breakdown in how the brain and the eye work together, and the brain can’t recognize the sight from 1 eye
jNNXv TIL a group of small (1 mm) adult Caenorhabditis elegans worms, living in petri dishes enclosed in aluminum canisters, survived reentry and impact with the ground and were recovered weeks after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster on February 1, 2003, found alive on April 28 of the same year.