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TIL in 1976, a struggling Princeton undergrad wrote his junior term paper on how to make an atomic bomb, using information he gathered from physics textbooks and declassified documents. He got an A in the class, but never got his paper back because it was seized by the US government.

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VBkA4 TIL Poachers have resorted to poisoning elephant water holes with cyanide to increase their efficiency. One poacher, Tony Maphosa, killed more than 100 elephants this way before being caught, after four years on the run
ADKwx TIL that the first known interstellar object detected passing through our Solar System is an asteroid called ʻOumuamua, found in 2017. It's a rocky, cigar-shaped object tumbling through space and it required a new astronomical designation: I, for Interstellar object. ʻOumuamua is designated "1I".
kOAgW TIL French Republican calendar sought to modernize the measure of time with 10 days per week, 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour, and 100 seconds per minute.
W7V0N TIL About the purple Earth hypothesis. It states that the Earth may have been more purple in colour due to retinal being used instead of chlorophyll by the microorganisms in Earth's environmentally harsh past.
D19jP TIL that mathematicians have proved a majority-rule democracy can be forced to vote in favor of any set of policies by constructing a series of intermediate policy sets, each of which a majority of voters will prefer to the preceding policy set.