› added 12 years ago

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TIL that octopuses are so intelligent, they’ve been known to escape their aquariums and crawl into others in search of food. They’ve even boarded fishing boats and opened holds to eat crabs.

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LQd0r TIL, Today in history - Arauco War: A series of coordinated Mapuche attacks took place against Spanish settlements and forts in colonial Chile, beginning a ten-year period of warfare.
nWnBB TIL that Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, once proposed a 10 gigaton bomb. It would have been 670,000x stronger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and 200x stronger than the Tsar Bomba, the largest bomb ever created. It's estimated to have been able to set all of France on fire.
188X TIL that a Mongol ruler had “Who ever opens my tomb, shall unleash an invader more terrible than I” inscribed on his casket. On the day a Soviet anthropologist exhumed his body the largest military invasion in history was launched against the USSR.
aww0J TIL Louis XIV's minister of finance had the huge Forest of Troncais created in 1670 to provide the future French Navy with a supply of oak masts. When the forest reached maturity 250 years later, the navy was busy switching to steam ships.
6M9Z TIL that the US House of Representatives has an official mace that can be used to threaten unruly congressmen.