9wXVM TIL about Porphyrios, a large whale who harassed and sank ships in the waters around Constantinople for over fifty years, to the point that Roman emperor Justinian I wished to have it captured. The whale eventually accidentally beached itself and was hacked to death by local townsfolk.
nWMEo TIL that historically the Indian subcontinent had only one true natural land entrance, the Khyber Pass. This narrow 33-mile gap in the otherwise impenetrable Himalayan mountain wall served as the main corridor through which almost every major migration and invasion entered India, including Persians.
4kWRg TIL there are places where marginalized people are killed for touching water
x6ny5 TIL about the 'Jaipur Foot', an ultra low-cost Indian innovation for prosthetic limbs. Around 2.4 million have been distributed for free across 27 countries since 1975. The charitable organisation was founded by Devendra Raj Mehta, an ex-Deputy Governor of the RBI and is fully funded by donations
5VRw9 TIL that there are eusocial flatworms
M7py0 TIL an Indian man named Ziona had 39 wives, 94 children, and lived with more than 180 family members in a 100-room house.
j6bEj TIL that the groom not seeing the bride comes from arranged marriages, when families feared he might reject her if he saw her first, so veils and separation prevented him from backing out and protected the marriage contract.
0dx4p TIL that the 'geo-centric' view of the Universe -- which places Earth at the center of concentric orbits by everything else in space -- was neatly described in a book known as the Almagest. The Almagest was published by Ptolemy in 200 AD and would remain accepted knowledge for the next 1200 years
grbE8 Today I learned that Australia is a bit larger than the continental US.
LQGyV TIL that breathing through your mouth means you lose out on Nitric Oxide that helps move oxygen from your lungs to your blood stream. Nitric Oxide is produced naturally by your nose so if you want more Nitric Oxide, stop breathing through your mouth and breathe through your nose.
b6b07 TIL the Great Flood story of Noah is theorized to be an oral history recounting the spilling over of the Mediterranean Sea into the Black Sea, which at the time was a fresh water lake.
QN5xM TIL that antibiotics have cured more human diseases than any other medicine, especially major bacterial infections like pneumonia, typhoid, and TB.