› added 10 months ago

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TIL Aristotle wrote the heart has only three chambers, and that tiny organisms can be generated spontaneously out of inanimate matter. It is now known that the left atrium is very difficult to observe and took Louis Pasteur to prove that growth doesn't happen in a container without micro-organisms

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5DkB TIL that nearly a third of the adult men living in the British territory of Pitcairn Island are convicted pedophiles. The U.K. foreign office does not allow its staff located on the island to be accompanied by their children, and all children under 16 require a special permit to enter.
Br81b TIL: In 1943 Winston Churchill called upon Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1373 to allow the English Navy to lease ports in neutral Portugal. This gave England access to the Azores Islands and helped change the Battle of the Atlantic.
5Vm7n TIL: Worker ants cannot mate; however, because of the haplodiploid sex-determination system, workers can lay unfertilised eggs that become fully fertile, haploid males.
JY0P4 TIL When the USS West Virginia battleship was finally salvaged 6 months after the attack on Pearl Harbour, a calendar was found in an air tight room where 3 trapped sailors had marked off 16 days until they died
Eg1bw TIL The Wright Brothers only flew together on the same flight one time, a six-minute flight on May 25th, 1910. They promised their father, Milton, they would never fly together to avoid the chance of a double tragedy and to ensure one brother would remain to continue their flight experiments.