› added 4 years ago

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TIL Nintendo of America tried to make Pikachu into a humanised tabby cat with large breasts

ZpZaD TIL In 1947 a man named Art Lacey bet his friend $5 he couldn’t buy a retired B-17 and turn it into a gas station. After a wild journey including a plane crash, alcohol smuggling, permit skirting, and a cross country trip, he won that bet and it stayed in place for more than six decades
awZYb TIL In the Olympics if there is a tie, contestants can share the gold medal. There has been 120 instances of medal sharing since the modern Summer Olympics began in Athens but this is the first time in history where rival athletes from different countries asked about the possibility themselves
D1arp TIL that first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, wrote a farewell letter to his wife before he went to space. He survived the mission but his wife would receive the letter 7 years later after Gagarin died in a plane crash during routine training.
N7kyQ TIL that on May 19th 1989, CBS broke into their primetime programming for over half an hour to broadcast a live dispute between the CBS News team and representatives of the Chinese government. (The government was terminating all foreign broadcasts in a lead up to the Tiananmen Square Massacre.)
6EwDW TIL that a 2012 study found 1,458 “new to science” bacteria species in our belly buttons. People’s bacterial profiles are unique, like fingerprints, and can be used in the same way. One person had a bacterium only ever found in Japanese soil," where he had never been.