› added 10 years ago

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TIL since many female insects mate just once in their lives, insect populations can be controlled by releasing swarms of sterile males into the wild; the females mate with them, never have babies, and die. The method has eradicated populations of dangerous insects in several regions.

Z81LG TIL thanks to an erroneous description of a US Customs flag in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter", since the 1870s there's been a popular conspiracy theory that the USA has an official alternative flag, the "Civil Flag", with vertical stripes.
b6BwE TIL that in the State of Georgia there is a 150-foot-deep canyon that formed due to poor farming practices in the 19th century.
l7517 TIL France detonated its 1st atomic bomb, the Blue Jerboa, on Feb. 13, 1960 in Saharan Algeria. This was the 1st of 17 nuclear weapons detonations that occurred in the area between 1960 & 1966. The Blue Jerboa was 3 times more powerful than the atomic bomb the US dropped on Nagasaki, Japan in 1945.
xGYo TIL in 1983 a preserved head was discovered at a bog in Lindow Moss. Believing the remains to be his former wife, Peter Reyn-Bardt confessed to murdering her in 1960. When testing later found the head was from 250AD, Reyn-Bardt tried to revoke his confession but was still convicted of her murder.
BrkLr TIL that Sir David Attenborough reached 1 million followers on Instagram in four hours and 44 minutes, breaking the world record, previously owned by Jennifer Aniston, who reached 1 million followers in five hours and 16 minutes