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TIL homicide levels in medieval England were at least 10 times what they are today.

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loQJ7 TIL about a species of extremophile bacteria that was only ever found in two spacecraft clean rooms, located 4000 km apart. In one of them a Mars lander "Phoenix" was assembled, and the species was given a name after the lander: Tersicoccus phoenicis.
A4bl TIL that up until the 1600s, a “black swan” was a metaphor for something that did not exist. Then a group of Dutch explorers became the first Europeans to see black swans in Western Australia in 1697, and the phrase was amended to mean “a perceived impossibility that might later be disproven.”
GK8J TIL a 16 year old boy was jailed at Rikers for three years without a trial or conviction.
e0JGk TIL of Berengaria of Navarre, the only Queen of England to have never set foot in the country. She was married to Richard the Lionheart for 8 years
XnJj TIL the CIA’s concern over soccer fields along the coast of Cuba led to the Cuban Missile Crisis. In September 1962, a CIA analyst noticed the fields and became concerned because, as he put it, “Cubans play baseball, Russians play soccer.”