› added 9 months ago

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Today I learned that most of the famous silver drachma coins of Alexander the Great were made out of captured Persian silver

Read more link.springer.com

via reddit.com

wBGP TIL that the world’s oldest company is Kongō Gumi, a Japanese construction firm founded in 578 and which operated independently until it was bought out in 2006.
yQRN8 TIL that carbon dating data for human bones can be thrown off by hundreds of years if the deceased ate a lot of seafood, because the carbon in fish could have been generated hundreds of years ago and then recycled among the fish and plants (and other food) before being caught and eaten by a human.
4XRxo TIL in 2011 at a rural Western NY high school, 14 students came down with an illness: verbal outbursts, tics, seizures, and speech problems. Fears about the cause of the outbreak drew national media attention. One girl had Tourette syndrome. The rest had mass psychogenic illness: mass hysteria.
0wOBL TIL about Memory of Mankind, a sophisticated time capsule project in Austria designed to last a million years. The designers made a system for the capsule to be discovered by a future society and even planned for the possibility of it being discovered by alien life.
ElgX TIL a 2006 trial of an autoimmune drug that was found to be safe in mice, caused human volunteers fingers and toes to die within minutes of taking it and left them with multiple organ failures.