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TIL during the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the German 4th Panzer Division cut off 10,000 Soviet troops. They took 2,000 prisoners... and just let the others go. They simply couldn't afford to take them all prisoner.

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x695k TIL about the loneliest whale in the world. Dubbed "The 52-hertz whale", it appears to be the only individual emitting a whale call at this frequency in the whole world. The whale itself has never been sighted.
oRkeK TIL of Adrian Carton de Wiart who served in the Boer War, First World War, and Second World War. He was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear; was blinded in his left eye; survived two plane crash and tunneled out of a prisoner-of-war camp.
nYxG TIL the infamous Donner Party was tricked into taking a new “shortcut” by a trading post that desperately needed the route to succeed. They even hid letters left to warn that the route was hostile and deadly. The “shortcut” delayed the Party by a month, stranding them in the mountains as winter hit.
LaPZ TIL that while preparing for his role as Rust Cohle in ‘True Detective,’ Matthew McConaughey wrote a 450-page deconstruction of his character’s life. It detailed the character at 4 pivotal points in his life and explored the mind of a “deep, wild-ass narco.”
yQRN8 TIL that carbon dating data for human bones can be thrown off by hundreds of years if the deceased ate a lot of seafood, because the carbon in fish could have been generated hundreds of years ago and then recycled among the fish and plants (and other food) before being caught and eaten by a human.