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TIL German Submarine U-505 was secretly captured by the US Navy on 4 June 1944 by Task Group 22.3. The crew attempted to scuttle it & a US 8-man boarding party rushed inside and were able to keep it afloat to be towed 3,150 km back to Bermuda. Capture of the ship was kept secret until after the war.

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j68Yv TIL that it was once believed that pulling up a Mandrake would cause you to be condemned to Hell and so animals were tied to the root instead to pull the root out of the ground
95xB TIL Only about 60-80% of your height is due to genetics, the rest is mainly due to nutrition.
wo6P8 TIL that in 1845, Sir John Franklin's Arctic expedition aboard HMS Erebus and Terror vanished. The ships were discovered over 170 years later, and researchers believe lead poisoning from canned food and poor water filtration contributed to the crew’s fate
168KV TIL the 1900 Summer Olympics had mail coach driving as an equestrian event. The contestants drove mail coaches drawn by four horses each, with the winners determined by a jury.
j6rZM TIL that the Bible never mentions the forbidden fruit was an apple