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TIL that J.R.R. Tolkien. once received a goblet from a fan inscribed with "One Ring to Rule Them All..." inscribed on the rim in black speech. Tolkien never drank out of it, since it was written in an accursed language, and instead used it as an ashtray.

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Ll5m TIL The time it takes our sun to orbit the center of the Milky Way is called a “Galactic Year” and is ~225 million Earth years. By that definition, dinosaurs went extinct last year, our sun is an adult at 18.4 years old, and the Big Bang happened just 61 years ago.
x4Z7 TIL the first man made aircraft to successfully land on another planet and send back data was the Soviet Venera 7 in 1970. After landing on Venus, the craft sent back only 23 minutes of weak data, presumably because it landed on its side.
gr1W7 TIL - Ants can lay a trail of Pheromones that connect into a circle, eventually trapping the entire colony in a “death spiral” where they essentially all run themselves to death.
VgQG TIL a figurine of Hans Solo frozen in carbonite is hidden in each episode of Firefly
4k9ja TIL that if you dug a hole anywhere in the united states through the center of the Earth, you'd end up in the Indian/Arctic ocean