› added 6 years ago

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TIL that upon imprisonment American Psychologist Timothy Leary was given psychological tests designed to aid placing inmates in jobs that were best suited to them. Leary himself had designed a few of them and used that knowledge to get a low-security gardening assignment, and escaped.

bP8Z TIL that Amelia Rose Earhart actually has never held the record as the youngest woman to circumnavigate the globe in a single-engine aircraft; that record belongs to Richarda Morrow-Tait
dDRWj TIL until the mid-1990s the Italian-American mafia controlled trash collection in New York City, fixing prices by extorting or murdering competitors or requiring them to join the price-fixing cartel. After an undercover operation convicted the leaders, trash collection costs dropped by $600 million.
Z80bR TIL that the Chowchilla kidnappers -who locked 26 children and their bus driver in a buried moving van- never got to make their ransom demands, since the phone lines to the police were occupied by worried parents and the media calling in. The victims then dug themselves out and escaped.
wLA57 TIL that during cold war, CIA conducted a $350 million cost secret project in 1974 called Project Azorian to recover a soviet submarine K-129 sunken in 1968 in the Pacific Ocean. It recovered only 1/3rd of the submarine, but the research lead to great advances in deep ocean drilling and mining.
e00j4 TIL that scientists are growing so-called "mini-brains" inside of rats, meaning we are perilously close to a rats of NIMH situation.