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TIL In his Inaugural address, President James Buchanan declared that the turmoil surrounding slavery was “happily, a matter of but little practical importance”. By the end of his four-year term, seven states had seceded from the Union, and civil war was imminent.

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4XAXb TIL during the Jim Crow era in the U.S., the turban was used by people of color for "confounding the color lines"—in other words, if you could pass yourself off as something other than black, you might circumvent some amount of discrimination.
5Y4rn TIL that the world's brightest cities are in northern latitudes, where the sun shines less, or in arid countries, where hot daytime sun inspires more evening activity. The current top 10: St. Petersburg, Mecca, Chelyabinsk, Kuwait City, Calgary, Edmonton, Kazan, Medina, Helsinki, Tangier
Q6W9 TIL a San Francisco man saved a threatened butterfly species by replanting rare flora in his backyard, transporting caterpillars to his local botanical garden, where they began to make a comeback
OG0G1 TIL there are cells in the pancreas called the "Islets of Langerhans"
9GdM TIL that 40% of the genetic information found in our GI Tract doesn’t fit anything ever classified before. Biologists call it “Biological Dark Matter”.