› added 11 years ago

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TIL In the late 19th century in Great Britain, attempted suicide was deemed to be equivalent to attempted murder and could be punished by hanging.

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5VyDB TIL: The Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe, uses passive cooling in a design inspired by termite mounds. It uses 35% less energy than comparable buildings, saving approximately 10% of the building's capital costs.
KQYw TIL Leó Szilárd, physicist directly responsible for the creation of the Manhattan Project, wanted to have a test explosion that could be witnessed by Japanese observers for them to surrender while sparing lives
moWM TIL that congressional approval for the first Gulf War was effected by the testimony of a Kuwaiti nurse who claimed to have witnessed Iraqi soldiers pulling babies out of incubators and throwing them on the floor to die. This never happened. The nurse was not a nurse. She was coached by a PR firm.
WkLjY TIL Walt Disney World is 40 square miles, making it the same size as San Francisco and 2x the size of Manhattan.
XErrj TIL elephants are highly empathetic and generous even towards other species. Once an elephant found a rancher with a broken leg and dragged him under the shade of a tree, guarding him and gently touching him with her trunk