› added 4 years ago

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TIL lead is used as a coolant in nuclear reactors

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X0J0r TIL that Irving Berlin is the oldest songwriter to ever have a song they wrote reach the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100 charts. In 1983, when Berlin was 95 years old, a version of his song Puttin' On the Ritz by the artist Taco peaked at Number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100.
4Q9N TIL Stalin’s hated his oldest son,Yakov, so much that when he tried and failed to commit suicide by gun Stalin joked “He can’t even shoot straight.” Yakov later died in a German concentration camp, possibly after disobeying a guard. Stalin felt this was an honorable death.
yQg6p TIL until 1871, officer commissions in the British Army could be bought and sold
4XXGN A deadly outbreak of cholera followed the 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti three years ago this week. Jonathan Katz, the only American fulltime staff reporter stationed in Haiti at the time, explains what caused the outbreak--and why it was anything but inevitable.
p8GXZ TIL that when Charles Darwin was a teenager, his father told him "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family."