› added 9 years ago

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TIL the most radioactive place on earth isn’t Chernobyl or Fukushima, but a lake in the southern Urals that was once home the the Soviet’s nuclear waste storage area. You could receive a lethal dose of radiation in 30 minutes just standing on the shore of the lake.

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aNAo TIL There’s a village in N. Kazakhastan dubbed “Sleepy Hollow” because the residents will fall asleep for days at a time. They suffer from encephalopathy and it took 4 years to discover the cause was radon gas.
JwNQ TIL that Kurt Cobain passed up playing a minor role, (i.e. the Eric Stoltz’s character), in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction movie. Also he thanked Quentin on the back of the In Utero album in the “Special Thanks” section.
ekPb TIL in the middle of the Savannah International Airport lies a 200 year old grave in the runway, marked because the family was reluctant to move the graves to another location while the airport was urgently built to use for bombers during WW2.
grM7 TIL that the U.S. Government killed over 10,000 people with poisoned alcohol during the Prohibition
YyMG TIL the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin rewrote much of the book from memory in old age believing it to be an entirely new work due to her dementia