› added 12 years ago

75

TIL that the light from the sun pushes the earth with a force of about 2 metric tonnes

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YoPx TIL All domesticated hamsters are descendents from a single brother sister pair that was found in Aleppo. They were bred in Jerusalem by a guy named Israel.
mdeY TIL in 1918 a homing pigeon saved over 190 American soldiers by delivering a message to nearby support despite having been shot through the breast, blinded in one eye, covered in blood, and with a leg hanging on by just a tendon.
neo6W TIL Davy Crockett was not only an American pioneer, but a politician and a soldier: as a member of U.S. Congress he vehemently opposed Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act (which led to the Trail of Tears) and eventually died in the Battle of the Alamo in 1836.
oRr5Y TIL About Georg Gärtner a member of the Afrika Korps who escaped from his POW camp in the US in September 1945 rather than being repatriated to an area of Germany under Russian control. Living under an assumed identity Gärtner lived in the US before "surrendering" in the 1980s.
GoBN TIL that when medieval Islamic scholar al-Biruni was trying to determine the exact position of qibla (the Muslim direction for prayer), he realized that a vast span of Earth’s land was unaccounted for in the modern maps of the time. This turned out to be the American continent.