› added 8 years ago

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TIL that in 1940, while fighting the Battle of Britain and desperate to gain American support to win WW2, Great Britain handed over technologies to the USA that included radar, sonar, plastic explosives, the jet engine and the first practical calculations for the atomic bomb.

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MenQV TIL A Wankel Engine doesn't use pistons, but instead a rounded triangle that would spin in a combustion chamber. The last production car to use one came out in 2003, including a model that could use both hydrogen and gasoline in the same engine.
x0Kg TIL that many popular parenting practices may be linked to reduced brain development in infants. Such practices include “the use of infant formula, the isolation of infants in their own rooms or the belief that responding too quickly to a fussing baby will ‘spoil’ it.”
1aA17 TIL The 2020 Olympic Games will take place in Tokyo, Japan, as predicted in the manga "Akira" released in 1982.
dDl97 TIL a billionaire bought a California beach, blocked public access to it, and cited 1600s property rights to justify his actions. After years of lawsuits, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a ruling that he violated state law, but the legal battle continues.
VoY0 TIL in 1984 an contestant made it onto the game show Press Your Luck. He discovered using his stop-motion VCR that the presumed random patterns of the game board were not random and memorized the sequences. On the game he was on, he won 45 consecutive spins. winning $110,237 in cash & prizes.