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TIL that for more than four hundred years beginning in the mid-seventh century, some 50 percent of the world’s Christians lived under Muslim rule

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jN1Dv TIL that the microwave oven was invented by accident. In 1945, Percy Spencer, an American self-taught engineer, was working in a lab testing magnetrons, the high-powered vacuum tubes inside radars that produced microwaves, where he noticed a peanut butter candy bar in his pocket had begun to melt
BrWZL TIL half of your brain stands guard when you sleep in a new place for the first time.
5YZJ8 TIL of the Asian corn borer, a species of moth that can mimic the echolocation sounds of a bat (their natural predator) and is used to paralyze females during courtship. Normally ineffective at copulating, when the male makes this sound - the female freezes in fear (thus making reproduction easier).
B4AD TIL a book published 30 years ago has cryptic art and verses hinting at the location of 12 buried treasures in America. Only 2 have been found.
l78pr TIL while there are more than 1300 species of insects in Iceland, no species of mosquitoes have yet been discovered, except the one preserved in the Natural History Museum, found in an airplane from Greenland in the 1980s.