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TIL that, due to a wartime shortage of copper, the Manhattan Project borrowed almost 15,000 tons of silver from the US Treasury to make wiring for the electromagnets in isotope-separating mass spectrometers. The wire, worth over a billion dollars at the time, was removed and returned after the war.

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xmZg TIL actor Taron Egerton (Kingsman: The Secret Service) grew up in a small town in Wales called Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch (58 letters)
6oPZ TIL that owls have serrations on the edge of their flight feathers, allowing an owl’s flight to be practically silent. Some fish-eating owls, for which silence has no evolutionary advantage, lack this adaptation.
rN1Ld TIL that legendary University of Tennessee football coach Robert Neyland helped design the stadium the team plays in. The stadium was renamed in his honor in 1962.
D1bxP TIL that a professor who ran a long running study on a pitch drop missed every single drop. One in 1977 because he went home tired, another in 1988 because he went to get a cup of tea, and in 2000 due to a malfunctioned webcam. When the next drop finally fell in 2014, he had died 8 month earlier
Brk0K TIL that Christopher Nolan was so secretive about Interstellar that he initially asked Hans Zimmer to compose the score with just a one-page story about a father who leaves his child to do an important job instead of giving him the script. It contained two lines of dialogue: "I'll come back & when?"