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TIL Precursors to chewing gum date back 5,000 years with the first commercial chewing gum released in 1848. To sweeten these early gums chewers would repeatedly dip the gum in a plate of powdered sugar to reconstitute the sweetness while they chewed.

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wLW7o TIL: The Grand Canyon was formed not by the Colorado River cutting down into the landscape, but the landscape rising up and the river roughly maintaining its altitude above sea level
XEkN8 TIL that during the Iran Hostage crisis, declaring solidarity with "oppressed minorities", the hostage-takers had released all but one African-American hostages in November 1979.
WkN5d TIL about Zofia Rydet, a Polish photographer who, at age 67, decided to try to shoot the interior of every home in Poland. Over the final 19 years of her life, she shot 20,000 images. She said, "The simplest, most ordinary documentary picture becomes a great truth about human fate."
6E8xW TIL Count Juan Raphael Dante, a director of the US Karate Association until 1962, didn't like the focus on ceremony, tradition, and protocol, over "effectiveness", so he created the "Dance of Death" system, taught in a mail-order booklet, World's Deadliest Fighting Secrets, advertised in comic books
M7Bg0 TIL Katrina Leung was an FBI informant and double agent for US and China. Codenamed “Parlor Maid” she was recruited to spy on China but eventually passed sensitive intel to China. She had sexual relationships with two FBI agents, James Smith and William Cleveland Jr., both of whom were her handlers.