- TIL that In 2018, A hacker broke into people’s routers (100,000 of them) and patched their vulnerabilities up so that they couldn’t be abused by other hackers.
2. TIL after losing her position in her university’s anatomy department in 1938, Rita Levi-Montalcini set up a laboratory in her bedroom and studied the growth of nerve fibers in chicken embryos. This work led to her discovery of nerve growth factor, for which she was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1986.
3. TIL the former World Chess Champion G. Kasparov described Hungarian female chess player Polgár as a “circus puppet” and said that women chess players should stick to having children. Later in September 2002, in the Russia versus the Rest of the World Match, Polgár defeated Garry Kasparov.
4. TIL mercy dogs were trained during World War I to comfort mortally wounded soldiers as they died in no man’s land
5. A school principal once made a student who’d gotten into trouble sit in the basement & read the U.S. Constitution as punishment. That student (who committed the Constitution to memory as a result) was Thurgood Marshall, who went on to become the first Black Supreme Court justice.
6. Charles Lightoller the second officer on the Titanic stayed onboard untill the end. And got trapped underwater until a boiler explosion blew him free. He survived by clinging to a capsized collapsible B. Later he volunteered in WWII and helped evacuate over 120 men from Dunkirk.
7. TIL that A man named Göran Kropp from Sweden rode his bicycle to Nepal, climbed Mount Everest alone without Sherpas or bottled oxygen, then cycled back to Sweden again.
8. There is an Australian pine growing out of an old railroad bridge in the Florida Keys named Fred the Tree. Fred survives with salt spray, lots of sunshine, and no apparent soil. Fred even withstood Hurricane Irma!
9. In 2003 two men, who weren’t licensed to fly, stole a parked Boeing 727 from Luanda International Airport and neither the men or the plane have ever been found.
10. A pregnant mother with twins lost one fetus in the first trimester and the other developed a coccyx tumor the size of a fetus that was killing it. Doctors removed baby LynLee from the womb, cut off the tumor, then put her back in the womb and she was ‘born again’ healthy 12 weeks later.
