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TIL that at the start of the infamous ‘Ice Bowl’ game, the referee tried to blow his whistle, but it froze to his lips. When he tried to pry the whistle off, he tore the skin off and he started to bleed. Instead of forming a scab, the blood simply froze to his lips.

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J4LQ TIL A group of women navigated canvas and plywood planes at night to drop 23,000 tons of bombs over invading German armies in WWII. Their stealthy swooshing sounds led them to be known as the Night Witches.
oBP4E TIL that in the 9th century Chinese alchemists in search of the elixir of life created a mixture of saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal. Ironically, short of a path to immortality, they had discovered gunpowder.
JYGY8 TIL Why blueprints are blue. In the mid 1800's, a photo chemical process was developed that enabled copying documents. The blueprinting process deposits blue ferric ferrocyanide in areas that were blank in the original document. Thus, the copy consists of white lines on a blue background.
KJ8E TIL there’s a series of 70-foot-long concrete arrows that bisects the country longitudinally all the way from SF to NYC, all designed to direct aerial traffic. They are from the pre-digital age and were installed by the Federal government in 1924, coupled with light signals to guide the way.
Wkred TIL that Bill Nye's family has a history of a neurological disorder called ataxia and the reason he decided not to have kids was to avoid passing down the condition to them.