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TIL that the ability of mantis shrimp to detect polarised light has inspired cancer-detecting technologies bc light reflects differently from cancerous and healthy tissue

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7vyb TIL Marie Curie’s notebooks are classified as low-level nuclear waste and are kept in a lead box in Paris
gr97A TIL that Loma Linda, CA is one of the five "Blue Zones", or areas in which people tend to live to 100 years old. This is generally believed to be because many of the residents are Seventh Day Adventists, who eat mostly plant based diets, get a lot of exercise, and drink mostly water.
eA5J TIL that the age old grammatical ‘rule’ that sentences can not end in prepositions is actually a myth. It began with 17th century writers trying to make English more like Latin, which uses that as a strict rule.
ZNZG TIL that in 2015 a man called into C-SPAN and began talking about West Philadelphia, and got all the way through the first two stanzas of the “Fresh Prince” theme song before being cut off
78MjX TIL that a scientist in the Ottoman Empire made an unpowered flight across the Bosphorus strait by jumping off the Galata tower. The Sultan then gave him a bag of gold and exiled him to Algeria.