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TIL Robert Maxwell, a noncombatant in WWII, was awarded the Medal of Honor for holding off a platoon armed with automatic weapons with 3 other soldiers using just .45 pistols and throwing himself on a grenade, absorbing the full blast. He is one of 7 surviving medalists, age 94.

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WkvvL According to Texas A&M’s Urban Mobility Report 2019, the average auto commuter spends an extra 54 hours in his or her car every year on top of the time it should actually take to get to the office. If you live in a city like Los Angeles, San Francisco, or New York, that figure doubles. In Los Angeles, for example, commuters spend 119 hours each year delayed in their cars—that’s almost three full weeks spent idling.
1awmr TIL Frank Sinatra’s son was kidnapped in 1963 and Sinatra ended up paying $240,000 (about $2,000,000 adjusted for inflation) in ransom before his son was safely returned.
4kBrR TIL when a cartoon character pulls something out of a hidden pocket it is referred to as Hammerspace: an imaginary extradimensional, instantly accessible storage area in fiction, which is used to explain how animated, comic, and game characters can produce objects out of thin air.
E14xp TIL A very tired chemist once spilled UK's entire supply of plutonium(10mg) on a table, and in order to recover it, used a saw to cut out that section of the table, then burned it. He recovered 9.5mg of the plutonium from the ashes.
6EXrQ TIL that the fur fringe or ruff around the outside edge of a parka hood is not just decorative, but functional. It creates a boundary layer of still air around the face, greatly reducing heat transfer versus a non-ruffed hood. This has been proven in wind tunnel tests.