› added 13 years ago

265

TIL the company that makes counterfeit-proof money for Australia made counterfeit money for Nigeria

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WOL TIL that in WWII the US tricked the German postal service into inadvertently delivering anti-Nazi propaganda to German citizens through mail in the form of stamps
jMop TIL NASCAR Legend Dale Earnhardt, along with many other NASCAR drivers, resisted use of the HANS device when it was introduced. The HANS was developed specifically to help prevent Basilar skull fractures common to car racing. Earnhardt later died after suffering this exact injury.
p8vlQ TIL an unconscious prisoner was declared dead by three doctors before he was discovered to be alive when he started snoring on the autopsy table
vlw7 TIL The reason Popeye eats spinach is because of an error in the calculation of its iron content by chemist Erich von Wolf in 1870. He misplaced a decimal point, recording iron as having 35mg of iron per 100g, instead of its true value of 3.5mg/100g. The former is equal to eating part of a paperclip
16ZZO TIL about Evangelista Torricelli, an Italian physicist and mathematician, and his groundbreaking creation of a vacuum. In 1643, he invented the barometer, an instrument used to measure atmospheric pressure that led to his famous observation that, "We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of air."