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TIL from 1887 to 1950, meteorologists in the US were forbidden from using the word “tornado” in their forecasts. Experts at the time thought doing so would create mass panic.

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N0ob TIL Harvard prof. Dr. Edward Clarke asserted that women should not be allowed to attend college. If young women studied too much, they would divert blood away from the uterus to the brain, rendering themselves “irritable and infertile.”
4kJQR TIL in 1994, a paper was published in a medical journal presenting a method to calculate the area under a curve, using rectangles and triangles, called "Tai's model". The researcher was unaware this method has been known for 2400 years and exact methods using calculus for 400 years
LQx1Z TIL about BonziBUDDY, a free virtual desktop assistant created in 1999. People called it spyware after it was found out to have collected user's personal information before serving them pop-up ads. Because of this, it had to pay $75k in fines, and was discontinued in 2004.
BrpNb TIL In 552AD two monks successfully smuggled silkworm eggs in their walking sticks from China to the Byzantine Empire, essentially ending the silk monopolies of China and Persia, and bringing silk manufacture to Europe.
5YOGn TIL in 1969, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, two heads of the Black Panther Party, were killed in their sleep by Chicago Police. It was described as a gunfight, but 99% of bullets were found to have been shot from the police, & fake bullet holes from the inside were found to have been planted by police