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TIL NBC’s Dateline aired a segment showing gas tanks on General Motors pickup trucks tended to explode on even low-speed impacts. G.M. responded with an investigation showing that Dateline had rigged explosions in the show by affixing model-rocket engines to a truck’s underbody.

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xVgn5 TIL the musical "A Chorus Line" is based on true stories from Broadway dancers, and the character of Sheila was based on, and originally played by, Kelly Bishop (Lorelai's mother from Gilmore Girls). Furthermore, the story Sheila tells in the play about her father cheating on her mother was true.
ZwQ TIL that the novel Fahrenheit 451 was first published in Playboy magazine.
5wVk TIL than in 1881 a woman got away with murdering a man who broke off their engagement by using the “hysteria defense,” i.e., a doctor told the jury that “Any virtuous woman when deprived of her virtue would go mad, undoubtedly.” The jury acquitted her in 20 minutes.
wLAJW TIL the Pyrenean desman (Galemys pyrenaicus) is a small semiaquatic, globally threatened mammal related to moles and shrews which inhabits Spain, Portugal, Andorra and the French Pyrenees. The desman has webbed feet and a very sensitive and elongated nose which it uses to find its invertebrate prey.
v9NK TIL there is a thought experiment from Plutarch (AD 46 – AD 120) called The ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus’s paradox, that raises the question of whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object.