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TIL that on April 1st 1989 Richard Branson flew an UFO-shaped balloon over London. It was realistic looking enough to have police and the military called and when it landed he had a dwarf in an ET costume step out of it to greet the onlookers.

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b9k6E TIL that Peter Gabriel is spearheading an ‘Interspecies Internet’ with 3 other scientists - an internet where humans and other intelligent animals can communicate with each other.
E1OAW TIL about Kintsukuroi which is the practice of seeing beauty in the flawed or imperfect. Instead of throwing out the damaged pottery, the Japanese would repair it with gold and create art from the broken.
d8geQ TIL that between years 4000 and 3500 BCE the Tripolye culture centered around modern Moldova in Eastern Europe have built the largest settlements in the world at the time, inhabited by 20,000 to 46,000 people. Cities of this size only reappeared in Mesopotamia a millenium later.
R7119 TIL that the word "mudita" is, in a sense, a kind of opposite of "Schadenfreude": mudita is a kind of sympathetic joy -- the taking joy or delight or pleasure in the pleasure or success of others.
mx6RO TIL in 1971, astronaut Alan Shepard hit 2 golf balls on the moon - he hit the first one into a crater, and claimed to have smashed the second one "miles and miles and miles". However, recent research has shown that the first ball travelled 24 yards (22 m), and the second ball only 40 yards (37 m)