› added 10 years ago

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TIL an Air Canada flight in 1983 ran out of fuel mid-flight, but the crew managed to glide the 767 to nearby airport. The plane turned out to have only been filled with half the amount of fuel it needed due to a miscalculation because Canada was in the process of converting to the metric system.

479o TIL that White Coke was a colorless, unlabeled variant of Coca-Cola developed to look like vodka for Soviet Marshall Zhukov, who was introduced to Coke by Dwight Eisenhower during WWII but did not want to be seen drinking a symbol of American imperialism during the Cold War
pw7N TIL: there is an orangutan named FU-Manchu who is an honorary member of the lock picking union because he has successfully escaped from his cage using home made keys multiple times. Many primatologists believe he has successfully demonstrated human level deception.
yoLX TIL that 20,000 years ago your average Aboriginal male would likely smoke Usain Bolt in a race.
e0XG6 TIL a review found 80% of Chinese clinical drug trials fraudulent. They found examples of fabricated and altered data with adverse effects withheld. In one example, the validity of data was questioned when they discovered a researcher responsible for recording it wasn't employed at the time.
R7nD8 TIL that the 17th century Ottoman Sultan Murad VI made the consumption of coffee a capital offense. In addition to closing Istanbul’s many coffeehouses, he would disguise himself as a commoner and stalk the streets of Istanbul with his executioner, beheading any coffee-drinkers that he caught.