› added 5 years ago

212

TIL that Frances Cobain's godparents are Michael Stipe (REM) and actress Drew Barrymore.

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abDZ TIL Giant Rats have been trained to sniff out 14000 landmines and other unexploded arsenal. The rats, which undergo nine months of training, are light enough to not trigger the explosives. They literally work for peanuts!
O8AY TIL Doctor Seuss’s first book took 27 publisher rejections before it finally found a taker, Chicken Soup for the Soul was passed on by over 100, A Time to Kill by 26, and George Orwell was told Animal Farm would never sell because “it is impossible to sell animal stories in the U.S.”
ByNy TIL that cochlear implants, rather than amplifying sound like a conventional hearing aid, actually converts sound into an electrical signal and transmits that signal directly to the auditory nerves!
d8Y9 TIL The highly classified Task Force Black removed or killed 3,500 insurgents from the streets of Baghdad, reducing bombings from 150 per month to about 2 per month.
ADv1l TIL that the US once had a "postal savings system" in which post offices could essentially double as banks. Many countries have active postal savings systems. The US' was discontinued in 1966.