› added 4 months ago

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TIL there is a Japanese word, tsundoku, which means buying a book but letting it pile up and never reading it.

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wLwpJ TIL one day Isaac Newton was asked by his colleagues why planets’ orbits are elliptical. He couldn’t answer so he went home and started thinking about it. A while later he invented differential and integral calculus, which he then used to answer the question.
Oo8Gg TIL that the man who wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was also a fighter pilot and an intelligence officer who helped Winston Churchill convince the American government to secretly fight Nazi Germany before they joined World War 2.
LkAd9 TIL In the 1960s Soviet Russia trained an all-female space squad in absolute secrecy. One of these cosmonauts — Valentina Tereshkova — became the first woman in space. But the existence of the female program was classified. Moscow shut the space squad down, and hid its existence for decades.
LQ6E9 TIL rhesus macaque monkeys from Asia were released in Florida's Silver Springs park 100 years ago. Today there are thriving colonies across Florida, many carrying Herpes B (which is harmless to monkeys but deadly to humans). 50 people have been infected with Herpes B and 21 have died since 1932.
PYBYJ TIL that in 1919, a former U.S. Senator from Tennessee named Luke Lea tried to kidnap Kaiser Wilhelm II and bring him to a trial for war crimes. He failed and only managed to steal an ashtray.