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TIL that spies can eavesdrop on a conversation from hundreds of feet away, just by watching a light bulb’s vibrations through a telescope.

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7E8p TIL while archeologists excavated the ruins of King Herod’s palace on Mt. Masada, near the Dead Sea, a 2000 year old seed was found from an extinct Date Palm species. A botanist planted the seed and it miraculously sprouted, becoming the oldest verified human-assisted seed germination in history.
Ooj71 TIL Mud or “dirt” daubers are harmless wasps that rarely attack humans, females prey on spiders to feed their young sometimes fitting up to 25 in a single cell, and when their larvae reach maturity the new adult burrows their way out. Blue dirt daubers prefer black widows.
4Xd4J TIL "red telephone", a direct line between DC and Moscow, isn't really a phone line and no phones were ever used. It went from teletype to fax machines. Since 2008, it's a secure form of email.
ONdg TIL of denatonium benzoate, the most bitter compound known to science. Its primary use is as an additive to poisonous household chemicals to discourage consumption.
dD0Z8 TIL In the 1500s, a priest named Diego de Landa asked a Maya scribe to produce an alphabet of his language and write a sentence. The sentence the scribe wrote was "Ma’ in k’áati’" (I don't want to). The sentence was deciphered in the late 1900s as Maya writing is syllabic, not alphabetic.