› added 4 years ago

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TIL about Desmond Doss, a WWII medic who was teased for his choice to not harm the enemy or wield a weapon. He would go on to win the Medal of Honor for saving more than 50 men after a mortar attack, and the heroics were made into the award winning movie "Hacksaw Ridge".

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DQBKD TIL Finland turned down the output of a nuclear power plant because the price of electricity became "too cheap"
vPyER TIL that on dry, cloudless nights in the desert, water can freeze at temperatures as high as 41 degrees Fahrenheit, 5 Celsius. This is due to a process referred to as or "Night Sky Cooling" or "Radiative Cooling", and allowed desert dwellers to regularly make ice more than 2000 years ago.
wL5V8 TIL of Zipf's Law. In almost every language, the most common word will occur 2x as often as the second most common word, 3x as often as the third most common word, and so on.
VMo6D TIL Sweden was the first country to put a eugenic state into practice before WW2 and the first state that set up for racial biology, an estimated 63,000 women were sterilised who were deemed to not have ‘Aryan-like’ genes, it ended in 1973 and compensation has been paid since 2000 to any victims
1aE94 TIL that in 1941, an Italian newspaper reported that the Loch Ness Monster had been killed by a direct hit in a German air raid. However, when a family boating on the Loch in August 1941 sighted the monster, the Daily Mail made a point of noting that Nessie had survived the Nazi attempt on her life