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TIL of Percy Julian, a doctor living under Jim Crow, who was a pioneer in the drug industry and laid the groundwork for the development of the modern steroid. He was also the first African-American chemist ever inducted into the National Academy of Sciences.

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neJ6d TIL of Lorenc Peter Elfred Freuchen was a 6’7” tall walrus-spearing, peg-legged, anti-Semite-clobbering Danish explorer and badass old-school 1900s explorer who escaped certain death by molding his own faeces into a knife and using it to carve through a solid wall of ice.
kJ981 TIL all of Australia's 200 million wild rabbits are descended from a group of 13 European rabbits released in 1859 by Thomas Austin, a British settler released for him to hunt on his farm, by 1920 they peaked at 10 billion before a mass scale poisoning to prevent causing more environmental damage.
wLLGo TIL carrots are orange for political reasons. In the 17th century, Dutch growers cultivated orange carrots as a tribute to William of Orange. Before this, they were mostly yellow, white or purple.
x6XJ1 TIL In Romance and other European languages, Hellas is named "Greece" after the Grecians, a Hellenic tribe which colonized southern Italy and interacted with the Romans, who used their name to refer to all Helenes.
16n4W TIL that in 1978, Vietnam veteran and US Army Lieutenant Colonel Jim Channon proposed the formation of the 1st Earth Battalion; a New Age revamp of the American military, trained in psychic powers and pacifism. Channon's ideas later inspired the book and movie "The Men Who Stare at Goats".