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TIL of arctic explorer Peter Freuchen who took a 1000-mile dogsled trip across Greenland, starred in an Oscar-winning film, amputated his own toes, escaped a Nazi death sentence, cut his way out of a blizzard shelter with a knife made from his frozen feces, and won The $64,000 Question game show.

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4kyw5 TIL After the big banking crisis of Florence in 1340 which wrecked the economy, an obscure laborer named Ciuto Branditi single handedly tried to organise his fellow wool workers into a union. He held assemblies and collected tithes for strike funds. His arrest caused a strike in the wool industry
6g1m TIL Before Google launched Gmail, ‘G-Mail’ was the name of a free email service offered by Garfield’s website.
J1lDj TIL that the stunt pilot Charles Hamilton was known for often flying drunk and crashed over 60 times. However, he survived every time and instead died of tuberculosis.
G44Q TIL Ken Kesey (Author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) volunteered for MKUltra experiments involving LSD and other psychedelic drugs as a student, and inspired him to promote the drug outside of the experiments, which influenced the early development of hippie culture.
wojM8 TIL that in 2020, a bizarre new type of extinct deep-sea plesiosaur was discovered in Norway. Despite being 5 to 5.5 meters (16-18 ft) long, the marine reptile's head was tiny, being only 20 centimeters (8 inches) long. It also had a small brain, extremely large eyes, and likely ate squid.