› added 11 years ago

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TIL the majority of states have official “ancient emblems"—several of which are fossils. An effort by an 8-year-old girl to give South Carolina its own official state fossil was thwarted however, because some lawmakers object to officially recognizing the woolly mammoth fossil on religious grounds.

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XE0j TIL that wikipedia operates an online university called wikiversity with over 13,000 free lessons on a wide variety of subjects.
Z89rG TIL that Kryptonite was introduced in the Superman story five years after the comic was first published. It was created as a way to give Clayton Collyer, the actor that played Superman/Clark Kent in the radio show, some time off so he could take a vacation.
dDjk9 TIL that Singapore People's Action Party is the longest uninterrupted governing party among modern multiparty parliamentary democracies. It has been governing for 65 years, and it is the second-longest governing party in history after Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party
PYAge TIL With one working arm, numerous facial wounds, and 8 of his crew dead or critically wounded, B-17 Pilot Lt. William R Lawley managed to fly his crippled plane one-handed all the way back to England, where he made a miraculous landing that saved the lives of all surviving crew members
l7LQN TIL that in 1977, Jimmy Carter penned a three-paragraph letter to accompany the Voyager spacecraft. Today, that letter is travelling beyond our Solar System at speeds of eleven miles a second. It is the first letter in history to reach extrasolar space.