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TIL an astronomer travelled to India in 1760 to observe Venus. His ship blew off course, and he missed the date. He stayed in India for 8 years to try again, but the sky was too cloudy. When he returned home, he had been declared dead, his wife remarried, his estate plundered, and his job lost

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JYEKQ TIL: Chemists Frank Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina were ridiculed by representatives of the aerosol and halocarbon industries for their hypothesis that CFCs would lead to depletion of the ozone layer. The chair of DuPont called it: "a science fiction tale...a load of rubbish...utter nonsense".
x6E1b TIL that a 68-year-old inmate in Malta was fined €800 for telling the former prisons director and two guards to “kiss my balls”, but he appealed the sentence and won
rNyxw TIL the Sahel is greening
aEw0 TIL that a young entrepreneur secretly lived in AOL’s HQ for 2 months, eating free food, using gym & showers, sleeping in conference rooms while working on his start-up. Everyone assumed he worked there
RPk7 TIL the least populated timezone in the world is GMT +10.5, which is only occupied by the Lord Howe Islands, a small chain of islands about 400 miles NE of Sydney, Australia with only about 350 people who live on it.