› added 3 years ago

85

TIL that Lea Thompson (Back to the Future) studied ballet as a girl & danced professionally by the age of 14, winning multiple prestigious scholarships. Told she did not have the right body to become a prima ballerina by Mikhail Baryshnikov himself, she changed her focus to acting.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

QjbX TIL in 2003, a website called Scroogle was created by Google critic Daniel Brandt, to allow users to search Google anonymously. It stayed active until 2012, where it was shut down by Brandt due to a combination of throttling of search requests by Google and a DDoS attack.
OodAX TIL 50-80% of our oxygen comes from plants and bacteria in the ocean which is more than the amount all tropical rainforests on land produce combined
xOBk TIL a lawyer was trying to prove, in a murder trial, that someone shot themselves, accidentally. While the lawyer was reenacting it he accidentally shot himself and died. He proved his point and the defendant was acquitted, only to be shot himself a few years later.
vJMB TIL that in 1968 an American vessel was captured by North Korea. The crew was abused, and to show the world, they used puns (“We paean the DPRK [North Korea]. We paean their great leader Kim Il Sung”) and gave the middle finger in propaganda photographs, claiming it was a “Hawaiian good luck sign”.
kJ5rE TIL of Dr. Jessie Lazear, an American physician who studied yellow fever under the famous Dr. Walter Reed. He allowed himself to be bitten by an infected mosquito, and died of the disease himself 17 days later, confirming how the disease was spread. His sacrifice saved millions.