Post * epR1L — Curious Curator

› added 2 years ago

91

TIL that the first cure for tuberculosis, streptomycin, was developed by a 23 year old grad student at Rutgers, Albert Schatz. It was also effective against other penicillin resistant infections and the first life saved with the drug was a young lieutenant wounded in Italy named Bob Dole.

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y80w TIL Putin wrote an oped for NYT in 1999 selling Intervention + Targeted Strikes on Chechnya

d8WdK TIL about the Doomsday Algorithm - a method to mentally calculate the day of the week given any date based on the fact that 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, 12/12 all occur on the same day of the week regardless of the year.

KYe74 TIL During WW2, Comache people were enlisted as code talkers, and when translations didn't exist from English to their native language, they used descriptive words instead. For example, tank was "turtle", bomber was "pregnant bird", machine gun was "sewing machine", and Hitler was "crazy white man".

KOeYB TIL that Ancient Egyptians built King Ramses II statue with precise accuracy to be illuminated by the Sun, a phenomenon that only occurs twice a year. Once on February 22nd for his coronation and again on October 22nd for his birthday.

rNJYd TIL that the Sphinx is the oldest known monumental sculpture in Egypt dating back to the old kingdom during the reign of Khafre (c. 2558–2532 BC). The nose was deliberately chiseled off before the 15th century as it's absence is referred to in descriptions by the 15th-century historian al-Maqrīzī.