› added 11 years ago

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TIL that Buddhists have been replanting decedents of the tree that Buddha reached enlightenment under for thousands of years.

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W7gVY TIL that planets can appear in retrograde motion to the earth for some time. TIAL that Mars does that every 26 months, Venus every 18 months, Mercury 3-4x a year, Jupiter, every 9 months, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune every year-ish
gMGvL TIL in ancient Sri Lanka, they used winds driven by the yearly monsoons to power some of the first steel-making furnaces to produce what's called Wootz Steel.
b6X94 TIL about Poverty Point, a Native American site dated to 1,700 B.C. which was built by moving 53,000,000 cubic feet of soil by hand, creating massive mounds which the "city" was built on. It was a society of hunter gathers that created an expansive trade network that reached from Louisiana to Ohio.
kZ4B TIL that in 1961 Belgians, with CIA involvement, ordered the murder of a democratically elected Prime Minister of Congo who just wanted for the Congolese to regain the natural resources still being under foreign control since the colonial times
P1pgg TIL that when a Japanese pilot was accepted into the Kamikaze program, his wife drowned herself and their 1 and 4 year old daughters in a river so that he would have no distractions in carrying out his mission