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TIL that those "baby on board" signs hanging in car windows serve a purpose of alerting first responders that there is a person in the vehicle that's unable to unbuckle themselves in the event of an accident

DQpEY TIL of The Blackwood Brothers, a southern gospel quartet. In the 1950s, after some members died in a recreational plane crash, the group was the first to customize a bus to make travel spacious and comfortable for entertainers, thereby inventing the customized "Tour Bus".
BrExd TIL Cherokee Native Americans began purchasing African slaves in the 1800s to labor on European style plantations and in mines. By the time of the civil war they owned over 8000 slaves who made up 14% of the population in the Cherokee territory.
yRdw TIL Shakespeare invented the name Jessica for the play ‘The Merchant of Venice’
Oo8kX One night in 1987, a Canadian man named Kenneth Parks drove for 14 miles from his house to his in-laws. He then broke in and made his way upstairs, bludgeoning his mother-in-law with a crowbar that he’d gotten from the boot of his car before stabbing her repeatedly to death. He then proceeded to choke and stab his father-in-law, who miraculously survived. Parks then drove himself to the police station and turned himself in. It sounds like a fairly cut and dry murder case, but after going to trial, Kenneth Parks walked free. Thanks to a combination of a lack of motive, his consistent version of events, and data gathered from EEG readings, no charges were pressed against him because all evidence pointed to the unlikely and bewildering truth that Parks had been sleepwalking. It remains one of the most remarkable cases of homicidal sleepwalking in history.
kJOKg TIL that the 1812 New Madrid earthquake made the Mississippi River flow backwards and cause a fluvial tsunami that hit Missouri