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TIL Low-background steel is steel produced prior to the detonation of the nuclear bombs. Typically sourced from old shipwrecks, it is often used for modern particle detectors because more modern steel is contaminated with traces of nuclear fallout

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4k86X TIL Emerson Romero was a silent film actor who was deaf. When movies with sound were invented, deaf actors got less roles and the intertitle text was removed. This led him to make an early form of movie captioning in 1947 so that movies would still be accessible to deaf people.
6EGQ7 TIL that in the past 100 years, parts of Houston have sunk by up to 12 feet due to aquifer depletion. This subsidence messes with drainage channels and makes the city prone to flooding.
ngOB TIL That Mathematical Physicist Arnold Sommerfeld holds the record for the mentoring the highest number of Nobel Laureates, but won none out of the 81 times he was nominated for the same honour
nen7r TIL the "fresh is best" culture led consumers to wrongly see frozen produce as lower quality. It turns out frozen fruit & veg are equally nutritious. The freezing process slows nutrient loss which occurs after harvesting. Researchers found no real nutritional differences overall.
epml6 TIL when the US government began to arrange prisoner exchanges with Japan during WWII it found that less than 10% of the people on Japan's list wanted to be repatriated. It then forged an agreement with 15 Latin American countries to ship their ethnic Japanese to the USA to expand its hostage pool