› added 8 years ago

150

TIL Medical students in 18th-century Scotland could pay their tuition fees in corpses.

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via reddit.com

dDjZE TIL that Henry Knox, namesake of Fort Knox where much of the US’ gold reserves are stored, ran a number of failed business ventures and accumulated large amounts of debt. When he died after swallowing a chicken bone, he left an estate that was bankrupt.
R5n9j TIL that +/- 42k years ago, the “Adam’s Event”, a reversal of Earth’s magnetic poles, may have led to the extinction of mega fauna, Neanderthals, and forced humans into caves as the earth experienced intense periods of cosmic radiation, solar winds, electrical storms, and drastic climate change.
DQePP TIL a German scientist named Alfred Wegener was ridiculed in 1912 for advancing the idea that the continents were adrift. Ridiculed as having “wandering pole plague.” or “Germanic pseudo­-science” and accused Wegener of toying with the evidence to spin himself into “a state of auto-intoxication."
b6D0j TIL of the eccentric Lord Longford who attempted to get parole for serial killer Myra Hindley, and who visited strip clubs in the 1970’s to compile a report on them. Longford nonetheless did acts of kindness, such as visiting a man who was dying of AIDS and had been abandoned by his family.
yLJ8 TIL there are so many different types of apples, if you were to eat a new one everyday, it would take almost 20 years to try them all.