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TIL Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, rewrote her novel word for word when she had dementia in her later years, unaware she had already written her most influential work

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6EjlQ TIL Pope Benedict XVI resigned in 2013, but announced it in Latin. One reporter got the scoop and broke the story because she understood Latin. Most other reporters waited for official translations.
AD5Wl TIL In 1986, two Pakistani brothers based in Lahore wrote one of the world’s first PC computer virus to protect their program from piracy. When the virus got to the hands of American researchers, it spawned an entirely new breed of software, the anti-virus program.
X019P TIL of the Schön scandal, concerning physicist Jan Hendrik Schön, who rose to prominence after a series of breakthroughs with semiconductors that made him in contention for the Nobel prize. It was later discovered that all his research was completely fraudulent.
pYJmG TIL that the lyrics of South Africa's national anthem employ the five most widely spoken of their eleven official languages – Xhosa, Zulu, Sesotho, Afrikaans, and English. The lyrics are sung in these languages regardless of the native language of the singer.
9YgNm TIL the film SpaceCamp, about children accidentally being launched into orbit on board the Space Shuttle, became known as a “marketing nightmare” after the Challenger Disaster happened just 5 months before its release.