› added 4 years ago

485

TIL about Operation Mincemeat, a British deception plot to fool the Nazis into thinking that the Allies were going to invade Greece instead of Italy by planting deceptive information on a corpse on the Spanish coast with the hopes that Spain would pass it on to German Intelligence.

Read more bbc.com

via reddit.com

OoDX4 TIL that removing lead from gasoline is thought to be one of the big factors that lead to the drop in the violent crime rate in America in the 1990s
VB75G TIL: The oldest grocery store in the Americas is in Quebec City
NXQBJ TIL about Musca depicta, a depiction of a fly as a conspicuous element of various paintings that was widespread in 15th- and 16th-century European paintings. Its presence has been subject to various interpretations by art historians.
Bowr TIL the pilot who successfully ditched Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009 was an expert on airline safety, an NTSB accident investigator, published a paper on airline crew psychology in a crisis, and had his pilot’s certificate in gliders.
78GkM TIL that the oldest known prosthetic leg dates back to 300BC and was crafted by Romans from bronze and iron with a wooden core.