› added 7 years ago

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TIL of Nellie Bly, a 19th century female journalist who went around the world in 72 days, pretended to be insane in order to expose the deplorable conditions in mental asylums, patented two designs for steel cans and ran a million-dollar iron manufacturing business, all before the age of 40.

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XEgO8 TIL Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula has the highest concentration of active (29) volcanos on Earth. Separated by only 180 kilometers (110 miles), 4 of them, Shiveluch, Bezymianny, Tolbachik, and Kizimen were all erupting simultaneously on January 11, 2013.
GYXRJ TIL a villager in China unknowingly used a hand grenade to crack walnuts for a quarter century, until he saw the grenade in a government flyer
LYX9 TIL that California, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin have ruled that “Ladies’ Nights” are against the law because they fall under gender discrimination
1ylD TIL in Japan’s Shima Marineland aquarium, a goldfish was thrown into an exhibition tank to be live-bait for a larger fish. The goldfish escaped through a tiny gap that led to a filtration tank, where it lived alone in the dark for 7 years, feeding off food scraps that made its way into the tank.
Vak8 TIL the sudden (seemingly overnight) onset of white hair due to stress is known as “Marie Antoinette Syndrome”, named after the ill-fated queen whose hair turned white the night before her walk to the guillotine