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TIL in 1976, a struggling Princeton undergrad wrote his junior term paper on how to make an atomic bomb, using information he gathered from physics textbooks and declassified documents. He got an A in the class, but never got his paper back because it was seized by the US government.

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J1aJQ TIL that in Chinese Folk Religion, a mortal human being could ascend into godhood not through the decisions of a clergy/church, but by the sheer number of people who believe that their extraordinary achievements led to apotheosis, which forced Confucian/Taoists clerics to canonize a person as a God.
Zp884 TIL the Sony PocketStation (The PS1 answer to the Dreamcast's VMU memory card) never left Japan for Western localization because it was too popular there and they couldn't keep up with demand at the time
eJeE TIL That Samsung has built a sentry gun which sits in the Demilitarised Zone between North and South Korea, which is hostile to anyone it senses who cannot provide an authorised access code
D1nOD TIL a Spanish archives director who only showed up to work to sign-in & sign-out for 10 years. During the time that he was "working," he ran a male brothel and was an erotic comic book artist who created a busty superheroine named Fallarela "who hurls flaming Valencia oranges at her enemies"
wolJM TIL that a plane carrying 6,000 pounds of pot crashed in Yosemite National Park. Climbers in Yosemite Valley heard news of the crash and sparked a miniature gold rush with up to 20 people searching the frozen crash site. Much of the weed was salvaged, smoked, or sold before park rangers caught on.