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TIL Gene Roddenberry never gave Captain Kirk a birthplace more specific than the state of Iowa. In 1985, when trying to find a theme for its annual festival, the town of Riverside voted to proclaim itself the future birthplace of the Starfleet officer. Roddenberry gave the town his blessing.

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nW5BY TIL before Saladin died in 1193, he had given away all his wealth to his poor subjects. His estate consisted of 1 piece of gold and 40 pieces of silver, not enough to pay for his funeral.
b9pLa TIL, in 1948, a man wore 30-pound, 3-toed lead shoes and stomped around a Florida beach in the night. The footprints lead people to believe that a 15-foot tall penguin was roaming their lands. He kept up the prank for 10 years, visiting various beaches. The hoax wasn't revealed until 40 years later.
x6M0k TIL Robin Williams improvised so much during the recording of Aladdin that the Disney team had over 16 hours of material, and his performance was deemed ineligible for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar.
NW0J TIL there’s a macabre science around “beating heart” corpses. In many cases, doctors and health care providers aren’t sure who’s dead. There’s also the “Lazarus Effect” where a corpse will sit upright, raise its arms and cross them in front of their chest.
a8VGN TIL that Mattiedna Johnson, born to Mississippi sharecroppers in 1918, used techniques she’d used to make things like butter, jam and soap on her childhood farm to develop techniques to capture and preserve molds for research that eventually helped in the development of drugs to fight scarlet fever.