› added 6 years ago

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TIL of Hannah Szenes, a Jewish parachutist dropped by the British into Yugoslavia during WWII to help rescue Hungarian Jews about to be deported to Auschwitz. Arrested, imprisoned and tortured, she refused to reveal details of her mission or her transmitter code. She was eventually executed.

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GKnj TIL The Hubble telescope uses a black & white camera. Scientists take color pictures by putting a blue filter in front of the lens and take a picture, then repeat with a red, then green filter. They then combine the 3 images to create a full color picture.
kJorm TIL that after Sam Cooke sang "A Change is Gonna Come" on The Tonight Show (Feb 7, 1964), the network lost the only recording of the performance. Cooke elected never to perform it again in his lifetime (he was murdered in Dec of '64), due to the song's complexity and ominous nature.
7rwRp TIL Because mountain lions usually wander the wilderness alone, scent scraping sometimes isn’t enough to locate each other for mating. A female mountain lion will ascend to a high elevation and call to a male by caterwauling, a loud blood-curdling screeching cry that can be heard up to 5 miles away.
69d9w TIL the Vespasianus Titus tunnel in modern day Turkey built between 79-89 CE, is considered the first tunnel in the world. The tunnel was carved through solid rock with connected canals to prevented floodwaters from silting up the harbour. It continues to survive seismic activity intact
e0ye6 TIL Marshall Mabey was a $1 a day NYC tunnel worker called "Sandmen". On Feb 19 he was working under the East River where the tunnel was pressurized to prevent cave ins. A crack in the ceiling vented Mabey up through the mud, the East River and 25 feet into the air. He lived and was uninjured.