› added 4 years ago

96

TIL that in July 2014, six sealed glass vials of smallpox dated 1954 were discovered by chance in a storage room in an FDA laboratory at the NIH in Maryland. Upon transfer to the CDC in Atlanta, two of the vials had virus which proved to be viable in culture. They were destroyed 7 months later.

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JYZlB TIL McDonald’s is the 5th largest real estate company globally. They simply lease property and franchise rights. “We are in the real estate business. The only reason we sell hamburgers is because they are the greatest producer of revenue from which our tenants can pay us rent." - McDonald's founder.
8vgP TIL that one woman successfully smuggled 2500 jewish children away from the nazis during the holocaust.
Ya8Z TIL Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, prime minister of Iceland, is the country’s first female prime minister and was the world’s first openly gay head of government
GYe6Q TIL that actor Tony Burton (Duke Evers in the Rocky films, Assault on Precinct 13, The Shining) was originally a professional boxer. He studied acting while in prison for three years for robbery, and turned it in to a successful career after his release
oBZmY You obviously can’t see it when you gaze up at the night sky, but Earth has a whole lot of junk floating around in orbit. There are all kinds of reasons why debris ends up orbiting Earth and many of the objects are discarded pieces of other spacecraft or long-dead satellites which have no use to anyone. Sometimes these objects crash into each other and create even more, smaller pieces of space junk which can damage active satellites and even pose a danger to astronauts.