› added 10 years ago

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TIL On December 11th 2002 two motorists called the police reporting of a car veering off the road. A search uncovered a car concealed in dense undergrowth and the long dead driver nearby. The man had in fact been dead for 5 months.

0wBZM TIL of the Samaritan Revolts. Centuries after the Jewish Revolts, the Samaritans in fact became the majority demographic in the Holy Land and revolted against the Byzantines, resulting in nearly total annihilation and their modern obscurity.
Zpx8D TIL famous psychologist B.F.Skinner trained street pigeons to guide rockets by training them to recognize the pattern of a target, and to peck when they saw the target. As the pigeons pecked, cables harnessed to each one’s head would mechanically steer the missile until it finally reached its mark.
Meb5B TIL An influenza pandemic took place in 1957-58 with outbreaks throughout the world with at least 1 million fatalities
RP6Q TIL that the gene that was bred into tomatoes by commercial farmers to give them a uniform color had the unintended result of preventing internal sugar reactions that give tomatoes flavor. This mutation (and lack of flavor) has been bred into almost all commercial American tomatoes.
DQePP TIL a German scientist named Alfred Wegener was ridiculed in 1912 for advancing the idea that the continents were adrift. Ridiculed as having “wandering pole plague.” or “Germanic pseudo­-science” and accused Wegener of toying with the evidence to spin himself into “a state of auto-intoxication."