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Today I learned that in 67 C.E., Emperor Nero found a boy named Sporus who resembled his deceased wife. Nero had him castrated, dressed in female clothing, and made the entire imperial court treat him as if he were the Empress.

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rRPLx TIL the man who discovered the placebo effect, Henry K. Beecher, was a medic in WW2. After running out of morphine doses for his soldiers, he gave them a saline solution which did not include an active drug. To his surprise, most patients reported pain relief, despite having severe war injuries.
7yOP TIL that a Japanese gymnast, Shun Fujimoto, once broke his knee at the Olympics in 1976 but didn’t tell anyone and performed miraculously despite his injury, winning his team the gold medal
XL1R TIL in 1945 a group of Soviet school children presented a US Ambassador with a carved US Seal as a gesture of friendship. It hung in his office for 7 years before discovering it contained a listening device.
wERM TIL Aircraft black boxes are designed to be able to withstand the pressure of being a mile underwater for up to 30 days. In the case of the Airbus box on Air France 447 it spent over 2 ½ years at over 3 miles deep and was still able to determine the cause of the accident.
D1Zjg TIL of the “Fruit Machine”. In 1961 the Canadian government hired a university professor to develop a machine to identify gay people. It was at the height of the Cold War and homosexuals were thought to be more susceptible to communism.