› added 11 months ago

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TIL about the Widowhood Effect: When a husband or wife dies, the surviving spouse faces a higher risk of dying over the next few months.

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rk4M TIL that in 1258 the Mongols destroyed Baghdad. Survivors said that “the waters of the Tigris ran black with ink from the enormous quantities of books flung into the river and red from the blood of the scientists and philosophers killed.” The siege marked the end of the Islamic Golden Age.
ydeM TIL In 2003, Pres. Bush started PEPFAR, providing antiretroviral drugs to African nations, lowering the AIDS rate by 10% and saving 1.1 million lives
OK5Y TIL Arnold Schwarzenegger secretly tricked Jesse Ventura into thinking he had bigger Biceps so that he could get him to bet a bottle of champagne when they measured
4d06 TIL that the President of France in 1920 was completely mad. He greeted the British ambassador wearing nothing but his official decorations and once walked out of a state meeting and jumped in a lake fully clothed.
M7A1m TIL about Ruth Harkness, the chain-smoking American heiress who brought the first live panda out of China