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TIL of RAF pilot John Cruickshank who was shot 72 times and still managed to sink a U-boat with his flying boat. With his navigator dead and him slipping in and out of consciousness, he flew his plane back for 5.5 hours, waiting for an hour for the sea to calm down before landing.

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0w9Qv TIL that in 1895, UK prime minister William Gladstone founded a public library. Aged 85, he wheelbarrowed his personal collection of 32,000 books the ¾ mile between his home and the library. His desire, his daughter said, was to "bring together books who had no readers with readers who had no books"
4law TIL that 12,000 bears are farmed for their bile in Asia which is used in traditional Chinese medicine and generates $2bn per year. Farming always involves surgery on the bears to insert a catheter or to cut a hole through the abdomen by which the bile leaks. Bear bile has no medicinal effect.
p8kKp TIL about "In Living Color", a sketch comedy show created by the Wayans brothers that aired from 1990 to 1994 where most of the cast was black, and where Jim Carrey, Jammie Foxx, Jennifer Lopez, and many other famous comedians got their big break.
R7KX8 today i learned that there is a genus of plants in the Aizoaceae family that is called Lithops (or living rock) which evolved to camouflage themselves in the surrounding rocks to avoid being eaten by predators.
gMbaA TIL that the @ symbol has been in use since the 1500s as an accounting abbreviation for "at the rate of". As in “12 widgets @ $1.” (The total would be $12, $1 each).