› added 3 years ago

102

TIL about Orphan Drugs. Drug needed for diseases/conditions so rare there is zero profitability for drug companies to develop, so governments have to step in and fund them.

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GMJ5 TIL An Australian beetle almost went extinct because the males couldn’t stop trying to mate with discarded brown beer bottles, thinking they were totally hot female beetles.
rR4pw TIL that Suzanne Vega is considered the “Mother of the MP3” because her song “Tom’s Diner” was used to test the algorithm for the mp3: if it could be compressed without losing the warmth in her voice than it would work on anything
kOjZ1 TIL that some guys in the Czech Republic figured out how to broadcast data in beams of light capable of streaming DVD-quality video over neighbourhoods.( 10 Mbit/s full duplex Ethernet point-to-point link.)
d84kd TIL according to declassified Soviet archives, during Stalin’s great purge of 1937/1938 over 1.5 million people were detained, of whom 681,692 were shot (an average of 1,000 executions a day). In comparison, the Tsarists executed 3,932 persons for political crimes from 1825 to 1910.
X0OXr TIL of the St Patrick's Battalion, a unit of the Mexican Army, was composed mainly of Irish Catholic immigrants who deserted the U.S. Army to fight for Mexico, due to sympathy for the Mexican cause based on similarities between the situations in Mexico and Ireland.