› added 9 years ago

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TIL Onions are eaten and grown in more countries than any other vegetable, with at least 175 countries producing an onion crop. And unlike wheat (the largest global crop by area harvested), the onion is a staple of every major cuisine.

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NXbDE TIL that in the Kenyan island of Pate, there is a village in which the entire population is descended from medieval Chinese sailors. The story is that when Chinese merchants came to the island to trade with the locals, they ended up running aground. They then decided to settle and marry local women
woM4Y TIL that after defending a priest who was accused of covering up child abuse, Pope Francis commissioned an investigation, realized he was wrong and changed course. He apologized to victims, and made the entire chilean leadership resign.
AD86w TIL Princeton's Roger Nelson PhD proposes that human consciousness affects the variance in randomness of hardware-based random number generators. Since 1998, Nelson's Global Consciousness Project uses a global network to create random data over time, which is then associated with real-world events.
jN0mM TIL that the WWF'S Iron Sheik, whose shtick was to be pro Iranian and very anti-American (usually alongside Nikolai Volkoff in the 80s), had previously been an assistant coach on the U.S. National Wrestling Team during the Olympics.
wJ4P TIL in 2012 Germany agreed to provide compensation to a new category of Nazi victims — 80,000 Jews who fled ahead of the advancing German army and eventually resettled in the former Soviet Union. As of 2012, Germany has paid $89 billion in compensation overall for Nazi crimes since 1952.