› added 10 years ago

1158

TIL in 1803 a mysterious beautiful woman in a circular UFO-looking boat called a Utsuro-bune washed ashore on a remote Japanese fishing village. She spoke no Japanese and carried a box depicting strange symbols that nobody was allowed to touch.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

81R8 TIL when Emperor Justinian II was dethroned, his nose was cut off and he was sent to live in Crimea. 10 years later, he returned to Constantinople with an entire Bulgar army of 15,000 men to retake the throne. He beheaded the two Emperors that ruled while he was absent, now wearing a golden nose.
vglR TIL China has been running the world’s largest eugenics program for more than thirty years. The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project is currently doing research which has the potential to allow the IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation.
Oo7jR TIL Charles N'Tchoréré, a Senegalese Tirailleurs Sgt. during WW1, CMDR of the Tirailleurs in French Sudan, came out of retirement to enlist in WW2 as a Captain of a French mixed Coy. Surrounded, they resisted for 3 days at 1 on 10. Refusing to be separated from his white men, Germans executed him
wr58 TIL the X-Files episode ‘Home’ which was about a murderous inbred family was based on a story from Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography where a family introduced him to their quadruple amputee son by pulling him out from under a bed after which he “flopp[ed] around” while they sang and danced.
E0bx TIL caviar is so expensive because to harvest it you have to kill the host fish, which must be at least 10 years old.