› added 6 years ago

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TIL that Boston Corbett - the man who shot and killed President Abraham Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth - castrated himself with a pair of scissors in order to avoid sexual temptation and remain holy

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OGBxX TIL spiders do ballooning, whereby they release silk into the air that catches wind or electric fields, causing them to become airborne. Spiders have been documented to do ballooning up to 5 km in altitude, and to be able to travel hundreds of kilometers.
Egyvp TIL about the Baseball Experiment where researchers tested the relationship between reading comprehension and prior knowledge.
e0VPb TIL: The Northern Cheyenne Chiefs said they were sworn to keep a vow of silence about the Battle of Little Big for 100 summers and had never publicly issued their account before because they feared retribution from the U.S. Government . In 2005, 130 years later, they broke their silence
e0QA6 TIL that Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Jack Anderson was targeted by the Nixon administration for assassination in 1972. The plot was foiled when the assassination plotters, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, were arrested for the Watergate break-in.
O8Z1 TIL that US forces in Afghanistan dropped small, yellow cluster bombs which (if they didn’t detonate on impact) were easily mistaken for the small, yellow food rations they also dropped.