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TIL of Castner’s Cutthroats, a platoon of Army scouts who served in the Aleutian Islands Campaign of WW2. The group was composed of trappers, hunters, miners and Native Alaskans. They seldom used ranks and never wore uniforms. In addition to recon missions, they fought in the bloody Battle of Attu.

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Z8mDv TIL Spaceballs wasn't the the first Star Wars parody, a 13 minute short titled Hardware Wars released in 1978 was the first. With a production cost of $8k and box office of $1million it even beat the earnings ratio of Star Wars. During a 1999 interview George Lucas named it his favorite.
mejR TIL: Nintendo’s Mario is named after the landlord of the warehouse Nintendo was using as their American headquarters, the company had gotten behind in rent payment, prompting an angry visit from Mario, the developers subsequently immortalized him by renaming “Jumpman” to “Mario”.
Yp097 TIL the term “Crosshair” comes from when the military used actual hair in optics during WWII. Mary Babnik Brown first woman to have her hair used for military aircraft bombsights because she had never chemically treated or heated with a curling iron.
gMR8 TIL that metal from the fallen world trade center were used on the Curiosity and Spirit rover.
x6PNw TIL that Diet Soda began with the 1949 launch of La Casera in Madrid, Spain, using cyclamate. In 1969, an experiment at UW-Madison found that a cyclamate combination caused bladder cancer in laboratory rats, and was accepted by consumers and doctors as a cause of cancer in humans.