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TIL that until the early 1920s, most astronomers thought that the Milky Way contained all the stars in the Universe. Following the 1920 Great Debate between the astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Doust Curtis, observations by Edwin Hubble showed that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies.

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o74R TIL In 1993, Dateline NBC ran a story on the danger of Gm pickups with sidesaddle gas tanks exploding upon impact. NBC was forced to apologize after it was revealed that they had staged the explosions in their crash test footage.
9KK6 TIL Most alarms and sirens fall into the frequency range 1-3 kHz where the human hearing is the most sensitive, but this frequency range is also a black spot in our sound location abilities.
gMEA8 TIL that Final Fantasy VII was originally planned for the Nintendo 64, but its cartridge-based system couldn't handle what they wanted the game to do and Nintendo refused to listen to Square Enix' advice of using CD-ROMs, so they jumped ship to the then in development Sony Playstation
0N55 TIL there’s a website where you can see the progress of removing the Costa Concordia
p86Ob TIL that Brazil was the only South American country to send troops abroad during World War II