› added 6 years ago

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TIL there is a guinness world record for "greatest robbery of a goverement" ,currently held by the dictator of the Philippines F.Marcos and his wife Imelda. It is estimated that they have embezelled up to 10 billion USD of which only 860 million have been recovered

Read more guinnessworldrecords.com

via reddit.com

v1p0B TIL the original Lego bricks were not invented by Lego but by a British company called Kiddicraft. As the Lego company was close to bankruptcy they found out about the bricks, marketed them as their own and made a fortune out of it.
6EvwQ TIL that during the Irish Potato Famine, the poor were hired for useless construction projects called 'famine follies' in order to provide them with work that would not take existing work away from other workers. These included roads in the middle of nowhere, between two seemingly random points.
GOV7 TIL that in WW2 English spies planned to make Hitler less aggressive by feeding him oestrogen, the female sex hormone. It would go unnoticed by his food testers because it was slow and subtle. The English spies were already close enough to Hitler to execute the plan, but it never went through.
JZm8 TIL that tomatoes, although botanically a fruit, are legally a vegetable as a result of the 1893 Supreme Court case Nix v. Hedden, as “they are seen as vegetables because they are usually eaten as a main course instead of being eaten as a dessert.”
8rJZ TIL “morning wood” occurs during REM sleep when certain neurotransmitters slow down which normally control blood flow. Morning wood also helps with bladder control at night.