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152

TIL that Hiram Maxim took out ads in the local paper to warn his neighbours in West Norwood on the days he was planning to test-fire his prototype machine gun in the back garden

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wD67 TIL Quinoa is so nutritionally dense and complete that it is being considered a possible crop in NASA’s Controlled Ecological Life Support System for long-duration manned space expeditions.
GAAN5 TIL that the British had a POW camp called Trent park during WWII. They would take axis prisoners of war and let them live in luxury, while secretly bugging the house. The program gave the allies lots of intel, such as the location of a V2 rocket facility.
ANavl TIL that the “SEGA” jingle at the beginning of Sonic the Hedgehog took up ~ 1/8th of the entire game’s storage size on the cartridge!
96Om TIL Herpes was considered unimportant until the 1970’s when a drug company purposely stigmatized it in order to create a market for a drug.
ADa04 TIL World-renowned IMF economist Olivier Blanchard and former advocate of austerity admitted he was wrong—and wrote a paper explaining why—after every single country which adopted "significant austerity" suffered economically.