› added 7 years ago

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TIL of Joy Milne, the woman who can smell Parkinson's. In one test, she was given 12 t-shirts, 6 from those who have Parkinson's and 6 from those without. She identified 11 of them but was adamant that one control subject had Parkinson's. 8 months later that subject was diagnosed with Parkinson's.

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WkOQA TIL garter snakes are actually mildly venomous. Nevertheless, they are incapable of seriously harming a human—though rarely, their bites have caused some swelling and bruising.
lYy5 TIL that in 1997 The Hill reported that Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee asked NASA officials whether the Mars Pathfinder photographed the U.S. flag that Neil Armstrong had planted on Mars. Her chief of staff wrote a letter to the editor telling them it was racist for them to point out her error.
rN7EW TIL: The widely-reported study that men leave their wives due to illness more often than women leave husbands was retracted in 2015 because an error in the data analysis code classified "no response" from men as "choosing divorce" which rendered the original results invalid and skewed.
xV6QD TIL that the Italian painter Raphael was often accompanied by fifty scholars daily; when Michangelo greeted him one day, he said "You walk surrounded by an entourage like a general," and Raphael responded, "And you, you walk alone like an executioner."
Bgxey TIL that two of the three battalions of Fiji's military is on international peacekeeping duty; one in Iraq, and another in Sinai. They are the third largest contributor to Sinai peacekeeping forces and the leading contributor to Iraq's.