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TIL a Catholic Priest in Brazil tried to raise money for charity by taking to the sky strapped to a chair and 1,000 helium balloons, got to 20,000 feet and then realized he didn’t know how to use his GPS, went missing, and two months later was found dead 100km out to sea.

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JYXav TIL of the Battle of Hainan Island (Chinese Civil War). The Communists conducted a successful landing operation using 2000 traditional wooden junks. This led the KMT Navy to underestimate them and tried to capture them, only for the junks to reveal artillery pieces, forcing a KMT Destroyer to flee.
LkMZm TIL of Dunbar's number, proposed by anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and avg. social group size. By using the avg. human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed humans can comfortably maintain only 150 stable relationships
Y7ZK7 TIL Greenland was so remote that no-one realised the Viking settlements had died out until 1721, when missionaries visited the island expecting to find Norsemen who may have relapsed to paganism and instead found ruins.
gvZ8 TIL Venice Island was built on a foundation of tree trunks. 1200 years later, those same trunks still support almost all of central Venice.
QrBL TIL in WWI shell shock was often misdiagnosed as “cowardice or lack of underlying character”. This led to more than 200 British soldiers being executed for desertion or leaving their post without authority.