› added 8 years ago

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TIL after his wife died because the nearest doctor was 70km away, Dashrath Manjhi carved a 360-foot-long and 30-foot-wide path through a mountain in 22 years, using a hammer and a chisel to make the path from his village to Wazirganj, with its doctors, jobs, and school, only 15 km away.

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9vEX TIL The Higgs boson is nicknamed ‘the God particle’ not because of its fundamental role in the universe, but because Leon Lederman, a theoretical physicist who wrote a book about it in 1993, called it the 'Goddamn particle’, as it was so difficult to observe
l4R1 TIL that Honeycrisp apples were developed in 1974 by the University of Minnesota and patent royalties have generated more than $10 million by 2011 for the University.
1aWw4 TIL That the inventor of petroleum jelly ate a spoonful every day, claiming it had tremendous health benefits. He lived to be 96. He also, reportedly, during a serious bout of pleurisy in his mid-50s, had his nurse rub him from head to foot with the substance. He soon recovered
0wXVA TIL that Popeye wasn't the main character of the comic strip he first appeared in. He was hired by Castor Oyl, the strip's protagonist, to steal money from a casino, but was later hunted down and shot by a hitman hired by the casino's owner. He lived, and was so popular he got his own strip.
GoBN TIL that when medieval Islamic scholar al-Biruni was trying to determine the exact position of qibla (the Muslim direction for prayer), he realized that a vast span of Earth’s land was unaccounted for in the modern maps of the time. This turned out to be the American continent.