› added 1 year ago

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TIL of Bird Island, a man-made platform off the coast of Namibia that serves as an avian breeding ground for the globally-isolated Cape Cormorant; as well as a renewable source of Guano (bird shit), which is used in fertilizer for it’s high nitrogen content.

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via reddit.com

Aa1o TIL People with many moles have longer telomeres and are more likely to live longer
kJ6a7 TIL about the Barkley Marathon - a 55 mile race that retraces the path of escaped prisoner Jame Earl Ray (killed MLK). It has been run annually for over 30 years but only 15 entrants have ever finished.
E1lvw TIL about the 1916 Black Tom island explosion, one of the largest artificial non-nuclear explosions ever. The explosion of 2 million pounds of ammunition and 100K pounds of TNT damaged the nearby Statue of Liberty and was felt in Philadelphia and Maryland. German saboteurs were the likely culprits.
VMvrQ TIL that in 2017, The Dallas Morning News apologized for a spelling error in a review of the original Star Wars movie... written in 1977, exactly 40 years to the date. They misspelled the word "Wookiee" as "Wookie", and apologized "to the seven-foot-tall hairy alien biped community" for the error.
KYvDw TIL about the Great Michigan Pizza Funeral, where Ilario "Mario" Fabbrini ceremonially disposed of 29,188 frozen cheese-and-mushroom pizzas. He had been ordered to recall the pizzas by the FDA after tests suggested the presence of botulism in some canned mushrooms he used on the pizzas.