› added 12 years ago

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TIL if the mostly unknown 10th President of the USA-John Tyler, hadn’t implemented the Monroe Doctrine, Hawaii would be a British colony today

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QJxvX TIL bees were declared as the most invaluable species on Earth at the Earthwatch debate. Five eminent scientists battled it out for fungi, bats, plankton, primates and bees
Oog0R TIL that Stephen Pruitt has made more than 2,500,000 edits to Wikipedia articles (he's edited a third of Wikipedia's nearly 5.7 million pages) and has generated more than 31,000 original articles in the past 13 years.
5Ve7Q TIL the piano failed to catch on when it was first invented in 1700. It was only after Johann Zumpe made improvements and J.S. Bach socially promoted the piano in 1768 that it eventually displaced the harpsichord as the preferred keyboard instrument.
MeK7b TIL That Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin concluded the first that stars were primarily made of hydrogen and helium in her 1925 thesis, but added that her results were "spurious" because of the consensus at that time. She was eventually proved right by other researchers, yet is almost never credited.
9wLkM TIL about the First Families of Virginia which include 6 US presidents from Washington to Carter, Robert E. Lee, and Elvis Presley, among many others.