› added 5 years ago

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TIL President Lyndon Johnson established the White House Fellows program in 1964. White House Fellows spend a year working as full-time, paid special assistants to senior White House Staff, the Vice President and there can be as many as 1,000 applicants for the eleven to nineteen fellowships

pR7Z TIL you can grow 6,000 lbs of of organic food on 1/10th acre
awykM TIL that in 1965 the Soviet Union detonated a nuclear device near the Chagan river to create an artificial lake with a volume of about 10 million cubic metres under it's Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy program. To date the lake is slightly radioactive and is nicknamed "the atomic lake".
M7kMW TIL about the Grande Seca (The Great Drought), the most devastating drought ever recorded in Brazil. It caused the deaths of 400,000-500,000 people. Of the 800,000 people living in the affected Northeastern region, 120,000 migrated to the Amazon while 68,000 migrated to other regions of the country.
g7W7 TIL that when Marie Curie’s body was exhumed it was found that her radium levels were below the acceptable limit. She likely got cancer from her early work in the military, not from her pioneering research into radioactivity.
e06nJ TIL Nathaniel Hawthorne was related to a judge named John Hathorne who resided over the Salem Witch Trials. Upon learning of his ancestry, Hawthorne was so horrified that he changed the spelling and pronunciation of his name so as to avoid any connections being made.