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163

TIL Winston Churchill was the 3rd great grandson of a Major in the Revolutionary War.

Read more winstonchurchill.org

via reddit.com

NXpkP TIL An estimated 10 to 15 percent of abducted Africans died on their way to the coast from the interior during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Historians also estimate that between 15 and 25 percent of the enslaved Africans bound for the Americas died aboard slave ships.
d8XRd TIL in 1941, the world's largest seed bank (created by botanist Nikolai Vavilov) was housed in Leningrad. As the Germans surrounded the city causing massive starvation, Vavilov's scientists refused to eat from the collection, slowly dying of hunger as they maintained 16 rooms of edible plants.
ZpYRR TIL based on fossil and biological evidence, most scientists accept that birds are a specialized subgroup of theropod dinosaurs.
W7vAL TIL in February of 2013 the Emergency Alert Systems of stations in Montana and Michigan were breached to play a zombie apocalypse warning, using the lines "Civil authorities in your area have reported bodies of the dead are rising from the graves and attacking the living".
VBWxm TIL A cog is not a gear, but a single tooth on a gear. This makes the phrase "a cog in a machine" that much more demeaning.