› added 8 years ago

527

TIL that trial by combat may still be legal in much of the United States, having never been explicitly repealed.

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xVNJ7 TIL Quebec engineering students invented a giant vacuum to clean up microplastics from beaches. At about 3 gallons/minute, it sucks sand into a tank which then separates particles by weight, so plastic can be filtered out.
jDyX TIL of Castner’s Cutthroats, a platoon of Army scouts who served in the Aleutian Islands Campaign of WW2. The group was composed of trappers, hunters, miners and Native Alaskans. They seldom used ranks and never wore uniforms. In addition to recon missions, they fought in the bloody Battle of Attu.
4kDL5 TIL In the opening prologue of Persona, Ingmar Bergman's 1966 arthouse film classic, the director inserted three frames (about 1/6th of a second) of an erect penis. This was excised from the American and British releases.
a8MYJ TIL it is safe to observe the solar eclipse during the period of totality, and without any protection.
0dwMM TIL that the gavel used by the US Senate was smashed to bits by Richard Nixon during a heated argument on US nuclear energy