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TIL that the replacement for ivory billiard balls were ones made from nitrocellulose, which occasionally exploded on impact with another ball. A bar owner wrote to the inventor saying that they didn’t bother him much but for the fact that every man in his saloon immediately pulled a gun at the sound

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DQ1LV TIL I learned about "Bombturbation", the cratering of the soil surface and mixing of the soil by explosive munitions, usually during warfare or related activities. Some places like Verdun in France (during WW1), were completely and almost irreversibly changed by this
rPYe TIL of “aerial reforestation” - a process whereby conical canisters which contain a seedling packed in soil and nutrients are dropped from a plane. They could drop as many as 100,000 saplings in a single flight. The system could plant as many as a million trees in one day.
QNWx6 TIL the orange is a hybrid between pomelo and mandarin
awLXL TIL about mass suicides; occurring as early as 206 BC in Astapa to as late as 1946 in Bali, Indonesia. These mass suicides, which can reach a toll of thousands, are a form of political protest of defeated groups against their aggressors and are regarded as an honorable act of heroism.
XZJE TIL that during World War II in Australia, there was a dog whose hearing was so acute that it could warn airforce personnel of incoming Japanese planes 20 minutes before they arrived, and before they showed up on radar. “Gunner” could also differentiate the sounds of allied and enemy aircraft.