› added 11 years ago

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TIL that around 1778, fashionable Parisian women rarely went out in potentially stormy weather without lightning rods attached to their hats–an artist sketched this hat-lightening-rod contraption (looks like a long drooping chain hanging off the hat, rather than an upright antenna).

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R7Wlj TIL the last US President to fluently speak a foreign language was FDR (French and German).
loYW5 TIL A 27-year-old woman underwent six months of persistent cough, sputum and fever;antibiotics and anti-tuberculosis treatment before it was discovered that she had inhaled a condom into her lung
9Y50G TIL about Henri Charrière. Sentenced to life in prison for a murder he didn't commit, he proceeded to escape from 9 different maximum security prisons, and was later pardoned.
awOdb TIL there is an ethnic group called the Karen people or Karens. About 7 million of them live in Myanmar, and about 8500 in Minnesota.
v1llL TIL: Many grains grown in the US, Canada, and the UK, are chemically dried or desiccated using glyphospate, an herbicide found to cause cancer.