› added 10 months ago

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TIL that Ruby Red grapefruit - among other modern foods - were the results of irradiating the seeds in "gamma gardens" of the 1950s, an effort to show peaceful uses for fission energy.

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e0LBn TIL of Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, Icelandic explorer, who sailed to America around 1000ad. She was the first European to give birth there. She also sailed across North Atlantic eight times between Greenland, Iceland and Norway. Later in her life she made a pilgrimage to Rome and back.
BGOe TIL that Whitney Houston’s cover of “I Will Always Love You” won every award it was nominated for
GJJ7 TIL: Grasshopper Mice have adaptation to turn scorpion venom into a pain-killer. They now prey on scorpions.
9w7R6 TIL Tunisia had an infamously bad performance in modern pentathlon at the 1960 Olympics. One athlete nearly drowned; one got disqualified for firing a pistol too close to the judges; three fell off horses; and they were caught cheating in the fencing part of the event.
R5xyl TIL that during the Cold War, the CIA experimented with using pigeons equipped with tiny cameras to conduct aerial surveillance. While it sounds like a joke, pigeons were genuinely deployed for spy missions!