› added 5 months ago

24

TIL that Boston Corbett, the man who shot and killed John Wilkes Booth, had castrated himself with a pair of scissors years earlier

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MjrA TIL during 19th century construction of Paris’s underground sewers, workers found lost medieval dungeons, jewels, and the skeleton of an orangutan that had previously escaped from the zoo.
GY6jg TIL that there's something other than a boat OR a plane - it was called the Ekranoplan, a stunning and massive ground effect vehicle.
E1RXo TIL that dolphins have names for one another, using a unique whistle to distinguish between different members within their pod.
Z8Lro TIL about the Ray Cat Solution, a way to keep future generations away from dangerous nuclear waste sites. The idea was to engineer a cat that changes colour in response to radiation — then create a culture around this cat so that if your cat changes colour, you should move someplace else.
4P5a TIL Bill Murray accepted his role in Ghostbusters only to finance a film which he had co-written. GB was the highest-grossing film of 1984, but Murray was so upset for the failure of the other film that he took 4 years off from acting to study philosophy and history at the Sorbonne, Paris.