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TIL in a 2009 TED talk about Malaria, Bill Gates brought a jar of mosquitos onto the stage and released them into the crowd to frighten the audience into considering the dangers of Malaria closer to home.

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v1Lp4 TIL Final Solution, a 2003 Indian film allowed a Pirate-and-Circulate campaign in protest against its ban by censor board (Get-a-free-copy-only-if-you-promise-to-pirate-and-make-5-copies). Over 10,000 CDs of the film were distributed and the director uploaded the movie to Vimeo during the campaign.
EgxwW TIL the editors of prominent science journal Nature originally rejected the first research paper demonstrating MRI because the pictures were too fuzzy.
LQvdm TIL As a teenager Bernhard Riemann finished all 900 pages in Legendre's book on the Theory of Numbers in six days. Riemann later challenged what the dimension of real space was and what geometry described real space, ideas too far ahead of its time to be appreciated by most scientists of that time
GY1KG TIL When he was the Governor of Tennessee, former US President Andrew Johnson made with his own hands a very handsome suit of clothes and sent it to the Governor of Kentucky, who had been a blacksmith in his young days. He forged a shovel and tongs and sent them to Johnson.
M7w8V TIL California operates the world’s largest engineered water system—drawing snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada, diverting rivers, and pumping water hundreds of miles. Roughly 50 % of available water goes to environment (rivers, wildlife), 40 % to agriculture, and only 10 % to urban/industrial use.