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TIL In 1609 the Kingdom Of Spain expelled hundreds of thousands of Moriscos, people of muslim ancestry who had converted to christianity, partialy because of a racial doctrine called "purity of blood". In some regions over 30% of the total population w...
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TIL that early TV remotes worked with a spring-loaded hammer striking a solid aluminum rod in the device, which then rings out at an ultrasonic frequency, requiring no batteries.
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TIL About Amedeo I of Spain, king for two years, after a couple armed uprisings, an independence war, assassination attempts and political deadlocks he willingly abdicated, leading to the establishment of the Spanish republic, declaring that "Spanish p...
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TIL Stonehenge as we know it today didn't look that way until after a series of major restorations were done beginning in 1880.
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TIL about the Zanclean flood: 5.33 Mya the dried-up Mediterranean Sea completely refilled within months, after being cut-off from the Atlantic for 630,000 years (Messinian salinity crisis). The waters broke through the Strait of Gibraltar at 1,000x the...
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TIL learned that in 2003, Virginia Tech built a 'self-made' super computer (ranked #3 on the Nov 2003 TOP500 list) by using 1,100 Apple Power Mac G5 computers. It was named System X, from the Max OS X operating system.
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TIL in Netherlands they have a tradition called 'dropping' where they leave their children in the woods at night and they have to find their way back home
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TIL The only plane permitted to fly on 9/11 after the attacks was a plane flying from San Diego to Miami to deliver anti-venom to a man bitten by a highly poisonous snake; it was escorted by two fighter jets
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TIL that there is not one documented instance of someone getting burned at the stake during the Salem Witch Trials. They were instead hanged or jailed.
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TIL The world's first Tokamak fusion reactor will start producing deuterium and tritium plasmas in the 2030s, and just the initial experimental trials will consume the totality of the world's tritium supply, most of which comes from Canada, or Canadian...
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TIL a ferry ship sank in 1987 after upper management cut cost on security measures, killing almost 200 people. The name of the ship was "The Herald of Free Enterprise"
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