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TIL Coca-Cola was first marketed as a brain tonic

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5609 TIL that in 2014, The Big Lebowski was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.
7rwMM TIL a 4-yr-old captive beluga whale who'd been living with belugas moved to a dolphinarium where her only companions were dolphins. In her early days with the dolphins, she made beluga "contact calls." Within 2 months, the beluga imitated dolphin whistles & dropped the beluga calls altogether.
8M7V TIL a study gave LSD to 26 scientists, engineers, and other disciplines, and they produced a conceptual model of a photon, a linear electron accelerator beam-steering device, a new design for the vibratory microtome, and a space probe experiment designed to measure solar properties, amongst others.
epmK4 TIL that American physicist Richard Feynman once faced off against a Japanese abacus expert to see which could calculate faster. The abacus consistently won on more simple operations, but Feynman was faster in division and complex calculations such as cube roots.
WkP69 TIL in 2018 BBC4 Gave an App to 18,000 people in the UK to simulate how a pandemic flu would spread. The results were scary accurate, and promptly ignored.