› added 12 years ago

83

TIL there were four elite samurai in Japan during the Bakumatsu era, and they were considered undefeatable by normal people. They were called Hitokiri (Manslayers).

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b9kNa TIL that by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, France was conscripting men shorter than five feet (1.5 m) tall.
05nN TIL that to punish tree thieves who cut down trees illegally, some cities spray trees with fox urine around Christmas time. It freezes on them and is odorless outdoors, but would stink up your whole house if brought indoors; the smell is “eye-watering.”
LDpr TIL that until the 1770s, Western civilizations considered kangaroos as a mythical beast, with “the head of a deer, standing upright like a man, and hopping like a frog … sometimes with a second head on its stomach.”
mxpXM TIL that during the Great Leap Forward, when Chinese sparrows were deemed a pest and tried to be exterminated, some of the sparrows found refuge at the Polish Embassy in Beijing. The Embassy refused to scare away the birds and was surrounded by people playing on drums causing the sparrows to die.
rRWjx TIL that bananas are slightly radioactive due to certain caesium isotopes. Therefore you should never eat more than 600 bananas per second to minimze the risk of a harmful radiation dose.