› added 3 years ago

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TIL about the woman who was hanging out with friends at the American Legion in a small Minnesota town. Her car slid off the icy road into a ditch. Trying to walk to a friend's house, she ended up freezing (solid!) in her friend's yard. She lived, was fine actually, and still ives in Minnesota.

loWKK TIL a Confederate soldier named John Stith Pemberton got stabbed in the chest in battle, and afterwards became hooked on morphine. He was working on a cure for his painkiller addiction when he accidentally mixed it with carbonated water and invented Coca-Cola.
KVo9 TIL during the Cold War, students at Stuyvesant High School built a particle accelerator in their school’s basement. However, when they powered it on, it “tanked the electrical system for the building and surrounding area.” > $10,000 were spent on the machine, but no one knows what happened to it.
l7JrN TIL that in 2004 Alicia Esteve Head, under the alias Tania Head, pretended to be a 9/11 survivor, created an online support group and ultimately was named President of the World Trade Center Survivors' Network before being discovered as a fraud in 2007 by The New York Times.
xVJoD TIL that "Baby Huey" was a 400lbs Chicago soul singer who died in 1970 at age 26 after releasing a single album. The album later became hugely influential on early hip-hop artists, eventually being sampled on hundreds of tracks over the past ~40 years
JMnQ TIL that in 1990, the US gov’t authorized sending coca eating caterpillars to Peru to fight the drug problem. Their poop is nearly 100% cocaine.