› added 4 years ago

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TIL about the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis, a clinical study on African American men where they went deliberately untreated by medical professionals as part of a 40-year experiment by the US Public Health Service. Cited as "arguably the most infamous biomedical research study in U.S history"

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l701a TIL of the Schöningen Spears, ten intact wooden spears discovered in a German mine between 1994-99. Strikingly similar to modern competition javelins, the 400,000 year old spears are the oldest worked wooden weapons ever found, and suggest early hominids used very sophisticated hunting techniques.
DQvwP TIL of a fungus that infects periodical cicadas, Massospora cicadina, which produces drug-like substances such as an amphetamine analogue, causing infected cicadas to be hypersexual, as well as causing infected male cicadas to allow themselves to be mounted by other males in order to infect them.
e098D TIL of Joseph Grew, the US ambassador to Japan during the lead-up to WWII, who in Jan. 1941 heard rumors in Tokyo that the Japanese were preparing a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in case of a break with the US. Grew even alerted the US State Department.
j6d7X TIL that the Thoroughbred racehorse Equipoise (1928–1938), mentioned in the song "Fugue for Tinhorns" from the 1950 musical 'Guys and Dolls', was a real-life stakes winner. While "Epitaph" is fictional, the American Quarter Horse stallion and racehorse Go Man Go was a great-grandson of Equipoise.
kjxe TIL that during WWII A. Wald proposed the seemingly illogical idea of reinforcing the undamaged areas of US bomber and not the damaged areas. The holes represented areas where a bomber could take hits and still return home whereas the areas untouched, if hit, would cause the plane to be lost.