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TIL that a man bought a house next to his ex-wife so he can install a giant middle finger statue for her to see everyday

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b9Bxa TIL Nazi spies tried infiltrating Russia in WW2 using fake passports; the passports were recognized as fraud because Russian passports use iron staples that stain the pages with rust, while Nazis used steel. During the Cold War, American spies made the same mistake
QJ6Aa Today I Learned about Operation Legacy, a covert program by the British Foreign Office to destroy colonial documents in order to "avoid embarrassment". In 2011, victims of the British response to the Mau Mau Uprising helped unearth 20,000 of the surviving documents that were classified.
VMDe8 TIL the passenger pigeon once had a population of 3-5 billion birds in North America. Hunters killed tens of thousands of them every day, then ignored calls to protect them when their numbers dwindled, until the last wild one was shot and stuffed in 1902, and the last captive one died in 1912.
nWDAW TIL the vampire squid is neither an octopus nor a squid and it's eyes are proportionately the largest in the animal kingdom. If agitated, it ejects a sticky cloud of bioluminescent mucus which is able to stick to predators, making them more visible to secondary predators
ADMmo TIL that young chimpanzees outperformed college students, in both in speed and accuracy, at a working memory task involving numbers. This suggest that chimps have a photographic memory, which allows them to memorize a complex scene or pattern at a glance.