› added 12 years ago

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TIL that during the Battle of Stalingrad in WWII, a local railway station changed hands from Soviet to German control 14 times in six hours.

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VB4Am TIL in 1961, astronomer Frank Drake created the Drake Equation, a formula to estimate the number of communicative alien civilizations in our galaxy, sparking the modern search for extraterrestrial life.
dJJZ TIL that in 1856, an Indian mathematician was hired to calculate the height of Mount Everest and found it to be exactly 29,000 ft. Authorities released the height as 29,002 ft to avoid speculation that they had just given a rounded estimate as it would have been hard to believe the exact figure.
W7v49 TIL that there is such a thing as professional whistling and even a World Whistling Championship!
wL78o TIL that the Mosuo (a Chinese ethnic group) believe that long ago, dogs had life spans of 60 years and humans had life spans of 13 years, and humans traded their life span with the dogs in exchange for honouring them. During the adulthood initiation rites, adolescents pray before the family dogs
NXXbb TIL that Alzheimer’s disease can be caused by a brain immune response to herpes infection. This theory dates to the early 1900s, but was ignored because the scientist was Jewish, while Alzheimer, who named the disease, was German.