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137

TIL that Tu Youyou, the first Chinese woman to win a Nobel Prize in medicine, developed a new malaria drug by finding a fever-fighting traditional herb mentioned in a 1,600-year-old text and then isolating the antimalarial compound in the plant.

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m1Oyo TIL during filming of The Shining, Stanley Kubrick made Jack Nicholson eat cheese sandwiches, which he hates, to get him into character
VMeEQ TIL plants often grow more after being watered with rainwater compared to regular water. Lightning in the atmosphere produces bio-available organic compounds (nitrates and ammonium, found in fertilizers) from the inert Nitrogen gas found in air, which then get dissolved in raindrops
neE9W TIL of The Testimony of Truth, a 4th century Gnostic manuscript that tells the story of The Garden of Eden from the point of view the serpent, a gnostic symbol for divine wisdom and knowledge, in which it depicts God as jealous and the villain in the story.
xZVg TIL: There’s an island called Monkey Island off the coast of Puerto Rico, where the monkeys naturally have Herpes B, which can kill humans. So the first rule of Monkey Island is “don’t get peed on”.
R5r5a TIL that, in the 1870’s, Oscar Wilde was madly in love with a young woman named Florence Balcome for two years, only to lose her to author Bram Stoker