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TIL Max Planck's professor advised him not to pursue Physics as he believed that almost everything had been already discovered. In spite of the warning, he proceeded to establish quantum theory and obtained a Nobel Prize for his accomplishments.

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oRZR8 TIL that a woman living in California in the 1940s housed thousands of spiders in her home to harvest and sell their silk to the US military for bomb sites during WW2. The government's couriers would arrive to pick up the silk with empty briefcases handcuffed to their wrists.
5YdND TIL Reindeer eyes change to a blue color in winter to help gather light during the dark arctic months and return to a golden color during the spring and summer.
VMjBD TIL that Henry Ford had initially lead the movement of shorter working weeks from the entrepreneurial side of things. He (counterintuitively at the time) showed that shorter working hours led to higher productivity.
d87x7 TIL The first gun in Canadian history was a matchlock musket introduced by Sir Humphrey Gilbert when he arrived in Newfoundland in 1583. The first guns made in Canada date back to the 1830s when William Gurd of York built guns that had locks converted from flintlocks
b9eGj TIL that a group of bears is called a "sleuth of bears". Also: a sounder of boars, clowder of cats, mob of cattle, coalition of cheetahs, bask of crocodiles, pod of dolphins, bed of eels, cast of falcons, business of flies, band of gorillas, boil of hawks, kindle of kittens, barrel of monkeys