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TIL that In February 1939, Lise Meitner described a groundbreaking nuclear phenomenon in a letter to Nature editor and called it Nuclear Fission. Five years later, a Nobel prize was awarded to Otto Hahn for the discovery of fission; a word he never used in his original paper.

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8ag58 TIL Kangxi and Qianlong had the longest reigns in China's history, both lasting over 60 years. Under Qianlong, the population grew from 242 million in 1735 to about 300 million in 1799 or about a third of the world's population, and Beijing was the world's biggest city with a million inhabitants
WkbWX TIL in 1992 the high court of Australia recognized for the first time that aboriginal peoples had rights over the land since they had inhabited it before the British settled.
R5NLa TIL - Henry Ford's chief strikebreaker/union buster, Harry Bennett, was immediately fired after Ford's retirement in 1945. Bennett drew a gun on Jack Bugas who delivered the news. Bugas, a former FBI agent, then took out his own gun and threatened to shoot Bennett in the heart.
RxNQ TIL that Cary Grant’s girlfriend convinced him to see Alice Cooper in concert. On the ride home, when she asked him what he thought of it, he said, “Remember I told you about the time I took LSD in my doctor’s office and shat all over his rug and floor?… Well now I know how that poor doctor felt.“
0yrv TIL of the Darien Gap, a thick rain forested area on the Pan-American highway that prevents people from truly driving across North and South America.