› added 6 years ago

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TIL in 1985, a Boeing 747 tumbled nearly 5.7 miles straight down before the pilots were able to get back control, just seconds before crashing. No one died.

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0alR TIL In 1854, during the Crimean war, the British hospital in Constantinople was extremely unhygienic. Patients lay in their own excrement, and rodents and bugs scurried past them. More soldiers died of disease than injury. Florence Nightingale fixed this by getting patients to clean the hospital.
XEnVR TIL in the United States, 78% of people with the name Leslie are female, but in England 95% are male.
Z8v04 TIL Grazing animals such as horses and bison are known to engineer the landscape around them, for example suppressing the growth of trees by trampling or eating saplings. When this process is harnessed to restore an ecosystem to a previous state it is called rewilding.
W7g8 TIL that George C. Parker, a con man, would sell the Brooklyn Bridge twice a week to tourists; the buyers would sometimes try to put up toll barriers.
WkY5Y TIL that Henry Rogers and Ron Smyth of the University of Toronto investigated gay lisp, a stereotypical manner of speech associated with English-speaking gay men. In 62% of their cases, listeners correctly identified gay speakers.