› added 4 years ago

96

TIL after the Napoleonic Wars, scavengers harvested bones from the battlefields to use as fertilizer.

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69ADZ TIL Pigeons use Earth's magnetic field to navigate. A small spot on their beak contains magnetite which acts as a tiny GPS unit for the homing pigeon by giving it information about its position relative to Earth's poles.
xQAg TIL the man who invented autopilot was also the founding member of the mile-high club.
VBKYB TIL about how, during World War II, the United States military experimented with using bats as weapons. In a project called "Project X-Ray" or "Project Bat Bomb," the plan was to attach small incendiary devices to bats and release them over Japanese cities.
07mM TIL That an American sniper once crawled on his chest alone for 4 days and 3 nights to assassinate an enemy commander
4X4Y6 TIL that up until the 1600s, a “black swan” was a metaphor for something that did not exist. Then a group of Dutch explorers became the first Europeans to see black swans in Western Australia in 1697, and the phrase was amended to mean “a perceived impossibility that might later be disproven.”