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TIL: In 1999, the U.S. government paid the Zapruder family $16 million for the film of JFK’s assassination.

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via reddit.com

xVOMo TIL that the handrail around the turret in some early WW2 tanks is an antenna. The presence of a handrail antenna would reveal to the enemy that the tank is a command tank, which made it a primary target in the combat. Because of this, it was eventually replaced with a whip antenna.
oBgA TIL in 1984, to prove to people that leprosy is difficult to catch through close contact, Pope John Paul II kissed a number of lepers in a South Korean leper colony.
0wlj1 TIL clovers used to be part of lawn seed mix and are helpful in many ways to keeping a healthy lawn. About 60-70 years ago they became classified as a weed by savvy marketing teams to sell you products like nitrogen and weed killers, which clovers do naturally by themselves.
W99B TIL There is an open-source social networking and sharing platform that is decentralized like TOR, has distributed file sharing like BitTorrent, and is “hardly possible to monitor from an external point of view”. It also has built in VoIP for voice chat.
bpB7 TIL Jimmy Carter deregulated the beer industry and we can thank him for all the awesome microbrews we have today.