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TIL that the death-sentanced murderer Joseph Paul Jernigan donated his body to science in 1994, and was then sliced horizontally into 1mm pieces for the purpose of creating a detailed data set of cross-sectional photographs of the human body.

oRYWW TIL about the Axis of evil in Cosmology. It’s the correlation between the plane of the Solar System and aspects of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and gives the plane of the Solar System and hence the location of Earth a greater significance than is expected by chance.
W7xnA TIL about Phoebus Cartel, an oligopoly that controlled the manufacture and sale of incandescent light bulbs in the '20s and '30s. It included corporations based in Europe and the United States, like Osram, General Electric, Associated Electrical Industries, and Philips.
emnn TIL The Concorde supersonic jet stretched during flight due to the heat it generated. On its final flight the crew placed their hats into a crevice in the floor which appeared during the flight, as the aircraft cooled the crevice closed, permanently sealing their hats in the aluminum airframe.
YpjjZ TIL that First, Second, and Third World referred to political affiliations during the cold war (NATO, Warsaw, Unaffiliated) and not about the strength of a country's economy.
lorWa TIL about the Fast Inverse Square Root, an ingenious set of code that quickly calculated accurate square roots in Quake 3 using floating points and Newton's method. However, it is not exactly known who on the dev team implemented the code.