› added 6 years ago

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TIL in 1995, China set out to return a desert bigger than France back to a flourishing ecosystem after centuries of desertification to combat dust storms, flooding and boost local economy.

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Kjjw TIL that in 1990 there was a Charlie Brown special called “Why, Charlie, why?” It focused on one of the kids developing Leukemia.
xwAB TIL a guy stranded in the desert dismantled his broken down car and made a working motorcycle out of it.
jNB4v TIL that hens store semen in storage tubules and can periodically release portions of it over the course of a month to produce numerous fertile eggs. If they happen to mate with a male they don't like, they can simply expel the entire sample and produce infertile eggs.
awZ6J TIL: Two billion years ago, a uranium deposit at the present-day location of the Oklo mine in Gabon, west Africa, had just the right environmental characteristics to sustain a nuclear chain reaction. With ground water acting as a moderator, it operated like a natural version of a nuclear reactor.
kOneW TIL of STEVE, an atmospheric phenomenon investigated and named by a group of aurora watchers in Alberta, Canada. A group member suggested the name in reference to the movie Over The Hedge, later given the backronym "Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement" by the American Geophysical Union.