› added 10 years ago

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TIL Nicotine is the tobacco plant’s evolutionary defence mechanism, which makes insects sick when they eat the plant, thus saving the plant from being eaten!

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d8jr7 TIL When Salvador Dali's body was exhumed 28 years after his death, his mustache was still perfectly intact.
aw7Py TIL in 1916 Albert Einstein wrote an article proposing a more efficient shape for wings. The plane built with his wings barely left the ground.
pXLN TIL a man fired blanks at Queen Elizabeth II, said he did it for fame, showed no mental issues, spent three years in jail, then changed his name and continued on with his life at age 20 once released.
nWya9 TIL: That the Beirut Explosion of August 4th, 2020 is considered one of the most powerful artificial non-nuclear explosions in history. It was equivalent to around 1.1 kilotons of TNT and generated an earthquake equivalent to 3.3 in magnitude.
QN87E TIL Michael Shaara's book The Killer Angels, 1975 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and the basis for the 1993 movie Gettysburg, reached the top of the NYT best seller list twenty years after being published. The Civil War battle novel is considered one of the best historic fictions ever written.