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TIL: That in 1959 a Russian zoologist named Dmitri Belyaev started a investigation into domestication (using Foxes) that is basically ongoing to this day.

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BDLD TIL when Mary, Queen of Scots, was beheaded, the first blow missed her neck and struck the back of her head. The second blow severed the neck, except for a bit of sinew which was cut by hand. When the executioner held her head aloft, the hair turned out to be a wig and the head fell to the ground.
JYA6B TIL of Enheduanna, a woman who is the earliest known poet and author in history from the 23rd century BC, who was appointed high priestess of the city of Ur by her father Sargon the Great of Akkad who was himself the earliest known emperor in human history.
0d045 TIL Wishing to "put a tip of gold on a golden life", philosopher Peregrinus Proteus, promised to set himself on fire in public, and he delivered: on the final night of the 165AD Olympics, he lit his own funeral pyre near Olympia and jumped in after delivering his own eulogy to a crowd of spectators
ndGB TIL of Arthur Ganson’s “Machine with Concrete”, a kinetic sculpture of 12 connected gear pairs with the last gear stuck in concrete. It can still turn though, due to gear reduction that cuts the rotational speed by 1/50th for each gear set. The last gear will take over 2 trillion years to turn once.
wo8RP TIL that the Yamato, the largest battleship ever built, was on a 3,000-man kamikaze mission to beach herself on Okinawa before she was sunk by US forces in April of 1945.