› added 6 years ago

188

TIL The most powerful pirate ever was a woman. Ching Shih, a former prostitute, controlled 1,800 pirate ships and 80,000 men.

Read more atlasobscura.com

via reddit.com

ep7k TIL The US’s teen pregnancy rate is not only the highest in the world, but also 16 times higher then the country directly below it (Poland).
XpyP TIL In the winter of 1963-64, a team of FBI agents spent their days hunched over portable record players, struggling to decode a message that threatened the morality of America’s youth. It wasn’t from the Russians or Castro, but a band of white-bread Portland teenagers called The Kingsmen.
16n9O TIL that bodies do not decompose in Lake Superior, due to the freezing temperatures, relative lifelessness, and lack of oxygen in its depths. The bodies of many sailors from its hundreds of shipwrecks still sit eerily preserved on the lake bottom.
5YwP9 TIL of the Manicouagan Reservoir, a 60 mile diameter lake in Northern Quebec created by a meteorite impact. The island in the center has a larger surface area than the lake itself, and it has been hypothesized that it was one of at least five impacts in a single event 200 million years ago
N79eE TIL that the ancient Incas performed skillful brain surgery with a roughly 80% success rate. In comparison, 500+ years later, Civil War doctors only had a success rate of 50%