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TIL that in some remote parts of the Balkans there is a practice where a woman could choose to live as a man and take on the role of patriarch if her family had no male heirs, as long as she makes a vow of chastity

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vZgj TIL Denis Leary and Bill Hicks were close friends, until Leary stole Hicks’ material
v1ggD TIL that some bacteria can move twice as fast as a cheetah in terms of body length per second and have biological motors that can rotate up to 17000 RPM.
gMvMD TIL that during the Chenrobyl disaster - Alexei Ananenko, Valeri Bezpalov and Boris Baranov accepeted a suicide mission to release a safety valve in time and, in doing so, saved the world from a disaster that would have been exponentially worse than the initial explosion.
0wyj5 TIL late artist HR Giger decorated his house like his art and included a haunted train ride and a penis guillotine
wLjrE TIL that Russian scientists discovered a Nazi base in the Arctic named "Schatzgraber" (Treasure Hunter). Officially a weather station the site was abandoned when staff manning the site was said to have eaten raw polar bear meat that was contaminated with roundworms.