› added 5 years ago

89

TIL that the Soviet gold medalist Elena Mukhina was forced back to practice with an unhealed broken leg, which didn't give her enough power to do a flip and broke her neck on the mat making her quadriplegic for life in 1980. After the accident she said "Thank God I don't have to go to the Olympics".

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

QJQyX TIL cars made in the 1950s often had a loud and resonant 'country horn', and a quieter, polite 'city horn'
N7J88 TIL There is such a thing as weekend jail for nonviolent crimes, where you check in on Friday and get released on Sunday
XEZBE TIL that superglue was more or less invented by accident in 1942, in an attempt to develop plastic gun sights for the war effort.
gGDy TIL that shops in Japan place orange balls of paint near the register as an anti-crime device. The staff throws the ball at the criminal, which explodes on impact and stains the criminal with distinctive orange paint for the police to easily identify.
EbNx TIL that the largest infiltration of the U.S. Goverment involved breaches into 136 federal agencies, foreign embassies and consulates, as well as private organizations. The culprits: the Church of Scientology.