› added 4 years ago

62

TIL that during WW2 Japanese people were fully convinced that American soldiers were devils that 'devoured women and babies'; so they jumped off cliffs to kill themselves and avoid being captured.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

77vb TIL of Giorgio Perlasca. A meat importer from Padua, Italy. He posed as a Spanish diplomat in Nazi-controlled Hungary in 1944, saving over 5,000 Jews from deportation to the gas chambers. One memorable act saw him stare down Adolph Eichmann who wanted to remove two 12-year-old Jewish children.
rNRQ1 TIL what causes old people smell. As our skin matures, its natural antioxidant protection declines resulting in greater oxidation of lipid acid. When lipid acid is oxidized, the chemical compound nonenal is produced, which gives off that old people smell.
5Vm9 TIL that a cartoonist confronted a burglar running through his house. He called the police and took pen to paper to produce a caricature of the burglar. The police immediately recognised the burglar from the drawing and he was soon apprehended.
bLoQ TIL that AT&T’s Bell Labs invented the message machine in the 1930s. However, it was hidden by AT&T from the public until the 1990s for fear that ‘voice mail’ would end the need for the telephone
E1gnX TIL William Kamkwamba, after being forced to quit school at 14 due to poverty, taught himself to build windmills out of trash, using books from a local library, transformed his village with electricity and became an international celebrity. Receiving a scholarship to Dartmouth and graduating in 2014