› added 6 years ago

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TIL on 1945, when Bess Myerson became the first Jewish candidate to win the Miss America contest, organisers tried to get her to change her name, sponsors dropped her and country clubs refused her because she was Jewish. In response, she toured the USA with the Anti-Defamation League.

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WOwY TIL the most dangerous category of the Guinness Book of Records is the Banzai Skydive - a diver throws his parachute at 10,000 ft and attempts to secure it.
698BJ Today I learned that you can craft the Sandstorm and Blizzard in a bottle accessories in terraria using a cloud in a bottle and hardmode items
Z80aa TIL about Italian scientist Francesco Redi who, in 1668, proved that maggots come from the eggs of flies. At the time, prevailing wisdom was that maggots arose spontaneously from rotting meat.
6EObX TIL that the Soviets realised that the Americans and British were developing an atomic bomb when they noticed that Western scientists had ceased publishing papers on nuclear science. Correctly guessing that nuclear science had been made a state secret, they began their own program
awpr9 TIL that fake oil paintings can be detected because of nuclear bombs detonated in 1945 because of the fact that isotopes such as strontium-90 and cesium-137 that can be found in oil did not exist in nature previously. If a picture contains these isotopes, it is certainly painted after year 1945