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TIL Young men in Ukraine had the choice between two years of army service or two minutes of cleaning debris off of the Chernobyl station. Many chose the two minutes and most of them are now dead.

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5N19 TIL Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton invented the dog whistle, meteorology, forensic fingerprinting and mathematical correlation. He also suggested that principles of animal breeding could be applied to humans, coined the word ‘eugenics’, and came up with the 'nature vs nurture’ idea.
8anvZ TIL the German cuisine currywurst was created by a woman named Herta Heuwer in 1949. She obtained ketchup and curry power from British soldiers in Germany and started selling her dish in the district of Charlottenburg, Berlin.
R7GZ8 TIL Blue eyes are not due to pigmentation, and actually appear blue due to their structure in the same way the sky does.
JYd7m TIL Sculptor Michelangelo had no experience painting frescoes and did not consider himself a painter when he reluctantly took the commission for the Sistine Chapel. He even wrote a poem about how much he hated doing it.
kJOZm TIL of “Nobel Disease”, a tendency for Nobel Prize winners to adopt pseudoscientific ideas later in life