› added 12 years ago

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TIL that Ian Fleming, the original author of the James Bond series, also wrote the famous children’s book “Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang”

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YpG6W TIL Desolation Islands [Kerguelen Islands] lived up to it's name being remotely situated in Southern Ocean, 3000+ km away from nearest mainland in Durban South Africa. There's no permanent resident, just 100+ researchers doing rotational work on flora, fauna & geological composition of the region.
xZd0 TIL that Soviet Russia had a movie genre called Eastern(Ostern) which was their version of the Western genre, with stories taking place in the Asian part of Russia
vaBj TIL the equivalents of the English saying “That’s Greek to me” are “This appears to be Spanish” (German), “This is Russian to me” (Dutch), “It’s German to me” (Philippines), “It’s Hebrew” (Finnish), “It’s Chinese to me” (Hebrew), “Sounds like Mars language/These are chicken intestines” (China).
neXoB TIL in 1971 Juliane Koepcke’s plane was struck by a lightning and broke up over the rainforest. She fell 3.2km (10000 feet) and survived. Despite having a broken collar bone and being extremely short sighted because she lost her glasses, the 17 years old girl survived for 11 days alone until rescued
4k085 TIL, immediately after WWII, the U.S Government took 1,600 Nazi scientists back to the U.S. This secret operation was called “Operation Paperclip”. Many of these ex-Nazis scientists went to work for NASA. The most famous ex-Nazi scientist was Wernher von Braun.