› added 10 years ago

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TIL that the story of the US army giving native Americans blankets laced with smallpox is a lie.

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GA1Wj TIL that there is a continuous line of doctoral advisor-advisee relationships going back from the present to the 1200s to a scholar named Kamāl al-Dīn Ibn Yūnus. He has more than 190,000 known academic "descendants", including Leonardo da Vinci and mathematicians Fourier, Lagrange, and Hilbert.
0wPdj TIL of Pomato, a grafted plant that is part tomato and part potato. The resulting plant have cherry tomatoes on the vine and white potatoes in the soil, resulting in plants with double crops. Grafting can also boost natural resilience and improve biodiversity by supporting different pollinators!
J4w4 TIL Haiti is the first and only nation established as the result of a successful slave revolt.
VM4J4 TIL that one part of Operation Anadyr, the Soviet Deception plan preceding the Cuban Missile Crisis, involved giving Cuban exiles in the USA correct information on the shipment of nukes and missiles, guessing (correctly) that the CIA would perceive them as lies to encourage an invasion.
nwdG TIL that paleontologists estimate the size of a tyrannosaurus rex penis to have been around 12 feet long.