› added 11 years ago

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TIL that a 65-acre “Jungle” is the largest of many Silicon Valley homeless encampments, home for up to 175 people at any one time. Periodically cleared by authorities, it is painstakingly rebuilt by residents.

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kO8Qg TIL Penicillin was discovered accidentally after scientist Alexander Fleming left a window open allowing mold to grow on a contaminated Petri dish.
m1L5E TIL in the 1906 book 'John Dough and the Cherub' the titular Cherub was a child of indeterminate gender; the editors created a contest to guess the gender and second place argued girl as "if it had been a boy he would have eaten the ginger-bread man at once whether it agreed with him or not"
E1yg7 TIL raw salmon isn't a classic sushi topping. It gradually became popular only after Norway started selling farmed parasite-free Atlantic salmon to Japan in the early 1990s.
XE16P TIL that the word "mortgage" literally means "death-pledge" in French
0na5 TIL that a doctor introduced hand-washing at his clinic in 1846 because he noticed a connection between women dying of childbed fever and the autopsies doctors performed before delivering babies, and that most didn’t believe him, and he lost his job, and later died of sepsis in an asylum.