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TIL a Russian gangster spent 15 years building a personal wooden skyscraper - at 144 feet 13 stories, it was the tallest stick-frame house in the world until it was partially demolished then burned down in a fire

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P11PV TIL scientists once swapped DNA cells between a human zygote and a mouse zygote to see what would happen. While the mouse zygote was able to reprogram and become a mouse, the human zygote "soon died" in every attempt, with no clear view on what would form.
78Eep TIL in the final years of his life, Harry Houdini spent substantial time and energy targeting 'spiritualists' who claimed they could read minds or communicate with the dead. Houdini saw this as an unethical branch of his profession that manipulated people vulnerable with grief.
WnBA TIL Arab and Persian lands produced several outspoken rationalists and atheists during Islamic Golden Age. Al-Ma'arri wrote and taught that religion itself was a “fable invented by the ancients” .
jJ0M TIL the actor Thomas Kretschmann, who appeared in King Kong and The Pianist, made a month-long trek from East to West Germany to escape communism when he was 19. He crossed 4 borders with only a passport and the equivalent of $100 and lost part of his finger to frostbite.
woeQJ TIL human sweat is “the most extreme and distinctively human evolutionary trait as a whole”