› added 11 months ago

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TIL that Mike Tyson got into his first fight after an older boy had ripped the head off one of Tyson's pigeons

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R7Vo6 TIL that a few weeks before the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, US scientists performed a safety test on the EBR-II reactor by disabling cooling pumps and automatic protection systems at full thermal power. The core passively cooled itself as designed without human intervention or damage.
o5yR TIL the Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before the year 2000.
vgYB TIL that the village of Badbea in Scotland was so windy children and animals had to be tied to posts or rocks to stop them being blown away.
YDvG TIL that two conductors have died while conducting the second act of Wagner’s opera ‘Tristan und Isolde’. They collapsed from heart attacks at exactly the same point in the music due its technical demands.
BrDMd TIL that Genrich Altshuller, a Soviet engineer, was given a 25-year prison sentence for sending Joseph Stalin a letter explaining a desire to improve Soviet engineering. He later went on to write science fiction books and found a famous engineering school.