› added 12 years ago

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TIL that in 1946 the U.S. Public Health Service infected 1,000 Guatemalan citizens with STD’s for experiments.

Read more hhs.gov

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W7V0N TIL About the purple Earth hypothesis. It states that the Earth may have been more purple in colour due to retinal being used instead of chlorophyll by the microorganisms in Earth's environmentally harsh past.
wxPM TIL that J.K. Rowling won the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize in 1997, 1998, and in 1999 for her first three Harry Potter books. This made her the first person to win the award three times running. She later withdrew the fourth novel from contention to allow other books a fair chance.
4BR6 TIL Christoph Waltz is his own voice actor in the German and French dubs of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained
OoD5g TIL the US Coast Guard used to regularly receive phone calls and telegrams from concerned citizens, asking why they hadn't yet rescued the cast members of Gilligan's Island.
epR1L TIL that the first cure for tuberculosis, streptomycin, was developed by a 23 year old grad student at Rutgers, Albert Schatz. It was also effective against other penicillin resistant infections and the first life saved with the drug was a young lieutenant wounded in Italy named Bob Dole.