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TIL That Medival Europeans thought that a brownstone supposedly found in old toads heads could cure almost any poison and the stones were often made into highly prized jewelry. These stones were in fact fossils dating from the Jurassic/Cretaceous period and had no curative properties.

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QJXXX TIL: Armin T. Wegner who resisted both the Armenian Genocide & the Holocaust. In 1915, he took hundreds of photos of the persecuted Armenians and was subsequently arrested. In 1933, he wrote a letter to Hitler denouncing the persecution of Jews, and was then sent to a concentration camp.
wL10J TIL about Shigeru Yokosawa, a sixty-year-old hospital admin who sacrificed his life by, in the face of an approaching tsunami, rushing to retrieve the hospital's satellite phone. The phone he saved became his colleagues' only lifeline to the outside world after the disaster.
rRN5y TIL that the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery with gold or silver lacquer (Kintsukuroi) is based on the philosophy that the object is more beautiful because it was broken
R5va9 TIL the Parthenon in Centennial Park, Nashville, Tennessee, is a full-scale replica of the original Parthenon in Athens, Greece. It was designed by architect William Crawford Smith and built in 1897 as part of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition.
b6LJN TIL that in 1907 French waiters went on strike for better pay, more time off - and the right to grow mustaches. At the time, lower-class workers were forbidden to have facial hair.