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TIL in 1999 NASA lost a $125M Mars orbiter because of a calculation error. The mistake occurred because Lockheed Martin engineers used English (inch, ft) measurements in their calculations in contrast to NASA’s metric (cm, m) calculations.

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gMg6A TIL the first TV reality show (An American Family) aired in 1973 on PBS and followed the Loud family: Bill, Pat, and their five children. This was nearly 20 years before Real World debuted on MTV.
gMjW7 TIL that a 59 year old American woman named Velma Thomas came back to life after being declared dead 17 hours earlier, and she had even been taken off life support.
xGM5 TIL that in 2002, a bunch of kids made a shot-by-shot remake of Jurassic Park
OE0X TIL Zaftig is a Yiddish word, derived from German, that means “slightly fat in an attractive way”
Yp8mx TIL of Jaycee Dugard, an 11-year old girl who was kidnapped in 1991 only to be found when her kidnapper walked into a school in 2009 with two young girls claiming they were his daughters. They were in fact his daughters, their mother being Jaycee; a prisoner for 18 years and a mother at 14.