› added 3 years ago

106

TIL that Silphion, a thought to be extinct contraceptive used by ancient Greeks and Romans, has been recently discovered in Anatolia.

Read more beatlyzer.com

via beatlyzer.com

yMdp TIL that there is no freight rail crossing of the Hudson River south of Albany, so any train travelling south from NYC must take a 280-mile detour or float across on barges
PYDPZ TIL in 2009 the Large Hadron Collidor was temporally disabled by a bird dropping a chunk of baguette on an electrical substation. In 2016, the LHC was again shut down, this time by a weasel.
PYxvZ TIL in Waco Texas, 1916, 10,000 people watched the lynching of Jesse Washington (castrated, burned, and mutilated for 2+ hours) A photographer sold postcards of the event. Prominent citizens eventually persuaded photographer to stop selling them fearing the images would come to characterize the town
Z8vba TIL that Posadism, a current of communism believed that visiting aliens from other planets must live in highly advanced communist societies and are bound to help earth-based communists in bringing an interplanetary communist revolution.
XEM0X TIL in 2002, an elderly Belgian man accidentally set off a booby trap he had set up to kill his family. This resulted in him getting shot in the neck. Detectives ended up finding a total of 19 traps the man had set up in the house.