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TIL the rarest flower in Britain is the Cypripedium calceolus. A single specimen grows on a Lancashire golf course under police surveillance

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via reddit.com

KOnr9 TIL about Project Azorian. In 1974 the CIA built a gigantic claw and lowered it three miles to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to snag the entire wreck of a sunken Soviet submarine. And they partially succeeded.
761L TIL when Mao Zedong received Nikita Khrushchev for a state visit in 1958, he had figured out Khrushchev could not swim. Mao, who loved swimming, decided to hold the meeting in his private swimming pool, forcing Khrushchev to wear floaties while they talked.
wL0xE TIL of the Harvard Sentences, a set of phonetically-balanced words used to test audio quality. It is used to test phone call quality, text-to-speech programming, and more.
Yp4pA TIL due to extreme lack of surface water, a unique project was constructed to reliably provide the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus with water. A 50 mile long pipeline passing under the sea transfers water covering demand for drinking and irrigation for the state at the northern part of Cyprus.
ZkJD TIL In 2003, Juan Catalan was cleared of murder charges, after outtake footage shot for “The Car Pool Lane” episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm showed him and his daughter attending the Los Angeles Dodgers vs. Atlanta Braves baseball game some 20 miles from the crime scene at the time of the murder.