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TIL "burking" is the death by asphyxiation caused by someone sitting on your chest and holding his hand over your mouth and nose. It is named after the Scottish serial killer William Burke, who used this method in order to leave few marks on the victims which he then sold to Anatomical Institutes.

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QJlJ6 TIL Roman persecutions didn't kill as many Christians as many people assume -- "no more than a few thousand" over three centuries. Contrast that with the up to 10,000 Christians killed by their Christian brothers in the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in the 1572.
p8Eae TIL that “cooties” originally was WWI soldiers’ slang for body lice that infested the trenches, before it evolved into a children’s game of contagion that even includes “inoculation” via a ball point pen and a rhyme, which emerged after the polio vaccine became common.
XEvp6 TIL of Arek Hersh, a Jewish man who survived the Holocaust as a child. At the age of 14, he was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was tattooed with the number B7608 and had his only photographs of his family ripped away from him. The Holocaust killed 81 members of his family. Only his sister survived.
OGaLR TIL recent research shows the demodex mite, which lives on most humans' skin, has an anus. Contradicting earlier findings.
QkKL TIL Dune the movie was initially set to star Salvador Dali, Orson Wells, Gloria Swanson, David Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Alain Delon and Mick Jagger with art by H.R. Giger, a soundtrack from Pink Floyd and David Jodorowski as director.It would have been 14 hours long.