› added 5 years ago

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TIL before dogfighting was a thing, enemy pilots would simply exchange waves or shake their fists at one another. At the beginning of WWI, recon pilots would often resort to throwing bricks, grenades, and even rope in hopes that it would get entangled in the enemy's propellor.

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p8WZ4 TIL the Guinness World Record for highest fall without a parachute is held by Vesna Vulovic, a Serbian flight attendant who was the only survivor after a bomb went off on a commercial flight over Czechoslovakia in 1972. She fell 10,160 metres (33,330 ft) and recovered fully aside from a small limp.
8ag58 TIL Kangxi and Qianlong had the longest reigns in China's history, both lasting over 60 years. Under Qianlong, the population grew from 242 million in 1735 to about 300 million in 1799 or about a third of the world's population, and Beijing was the world's biggest city with a million inhabitants
VMDvk TIL you are supposed to put the toilet seat down before flushing or you surround the air with all kinds of things like feces and other particles.
wKd1 TIL there is an 80 Million year old species made up entirely of females. “Bdelloid rotifers are to microscopic life as Rogue is to the X-Men.” They steal DNA from other organisms, mutating their own genes to absorb new traits. They can also survive 9 yrs of Desiccation.
XBD6 TIL Arctic Explorer Peter Freuchen starred in an Oscar winning film, escaped a Nazi Death Camp, won $64,000 on a game show and escaped blizzard shelter with a chisel made from frozen excrement