› added 10 years ago

81

TIL that the Irish invented capital letters

Read more historyworld.net

via reddit.com

65JW TIL that in 2006, a 45-y.o. woman posed as her 17 y.o. daughter online, sending men provocative photos and panties stolen from the girl while pitting her online boyfriends against one another. One of the men eventually killed another in a jealous rage. He went to prison, but she was never charged.
VMNZB TIL a 13,000 year old farming village was instantly ended when fragments from a passing comet exploded in mid-air, leaving behind glass spheres, melted iron/sulfur, and nanodiamonds.
p85y8 TIL that having more lifeboats on the Titanic would not have saved more lives. In fact, taking into account the amount of time they had to launch and the amount of crew there were, it’s actually incredible that they managed to launch as many as they did.
gMnZb TIL of Eva Saxl, a diabetic woman who synthesised her own insulin in a basement during WWII, saving not only her own life but the lives of over 200 people in the Shanghai Ghetto who would have died when legal insulin became unavailable
6E4j7 TIL the origins of Chemotherapy come from mustard gas during WWII when scientists realized that it damaged DNA and decreased the formation of blood cells by the bone marrow. They wondered if similar compounds would have a similar effect on cancer cell proliferation. And so Chemo was born.