› added 6 years ago

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TIL that Zeppo, the youngest Marx Brother, invented a wristwatch that monitored the pulse rate of cardiac patients and gave off an alarm if the heartbeat became irregular. He was a friend of Frank Sinatra, with whom his wife Barbara had an affair and later married. He became a theatrical agent.

N7omb TIL that the first person of color to ever be vice president of the United States was Charles Curtis, VP to Herbert Hoover who was of American Indian tribal citizenship
x6Awb TIL about the Wada Test, a procedure that "shuts down" one hemisphere of your brain at a time, leaving the other one awake. This allows the hemispheres to be evaluated for language and memory capacities individually.
x7Yk TIL in the online game EVE a player group spent 12 months infiltrating a rival group, then assassinated their leader and stole or destroyed $16,500.00 USD worth of game money and supplies.
16bDD TIL that “The Cloister and the Hearth,” a historical novel written in 1861 by Charles Reade, was the favorite book of both Thomas Wolfe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Rudyard Kipling & Oscar Wilde loved it; George Orville couldn’t stand it. It’s a tale of forbidden love, adventure, betrayal, & action.
d8oaj TIL that even though seed-bearing plants evolved ~360 million years ago, all plants that bare flowers or fruits have only existed for the past ~140 million years. Before seeds, plants used to reproduce through spores. The only living ancestors of these plants are ferns, horsetails, lycophytes.