› added 12 years ago

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TIL only 3 of the 12 people on board the Enola Gay knew the purpose of their mission to Hiroshima

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4bAb TIL all steel produced after 1945 is contaminated with background radiation because of the use of nuclear weapons. Such steel is unusable for many scientific and medical applications and steel made before 1945, often taken from sunken battleships, must be used instead.
N7yoJ TIL that the most complex word in the English language, or the word with the longest dictionary definition, is the word "set", with 430 senses and a ~60,000-word definition in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Wk5M9 TIL while modern Icelanders' paternal ancestry is primarily (75%) Norse, most of their maternal ancestry (62%) is from Scotland/Ireland
OoLXR TIL that the last known survivor of the 1906 San Fransisco Earthquake died in 2016.
p8emG TIL President John F. Kennedy was a known speed reader and was rumored to be one of the fastest speakers in the world. Reportedly, he would read six newspapers cover to cover each morning and in an interview spoke 327 words in just a minute.