› added 1 year ago

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TIL of Anton-Babinski syndrome, a form of blindness from damage to the brain—cortical blindness, where the patient firmly denies their loss of vision, as the disconnection between speech and visual pathways causes them to lose the concept of sight, filling in gaps with hallucinations—confabulations.

Read more ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

via reddit.com

1aMD4 TIL: ANZAC day, April 25, is a national day of remembrance commemorated by 2 nations, Australia and New Zealand, that broadly commemorates all who have served & died in all wars, conflicts, and peacekeeping. the date is the anniversary of the ill fated invasion of Gallipoli, Turkey in WW1
Gp0G TIL there’s a park with a statue of John Lennon in La Havana where a security guard is paid to sit next to the statue and put his glasses on and off if requested because they always got stolen / vandalized.
Z8llp TIL When Washington became president, he scrapped the plans for "Washington monument" as he didn’t want to use public money for a personal memorial monument. Long after he died, In 1833 a small group of Washingtonians established a society to raise private funds for the project and got it built.
nJRB TIL It is often assumed in astrobiology that if life exists somewhere else in the universe, it will also be carbon based.This assumption is referred to by critics as carbon chauvinism.
7r7N7 TIL in 1817 an English man named Abraham Thornton successfully avoided a murder charge by demanding "trial by battle." It turned out that the practice was still technically allowed under the law despite having not been used for hundreds of years. Parliament finally abolished it one year later.