› added 11 years ago

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TIL that when faced with long-range rockets from Nazi Germany, the British used their double agents to make the Nazis think the missiles were falling short. The Nazis would hit areas miles over their targets for much of 1944.

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mxwjY TIL: Scientists in India found a new species of pit vipers and named it after Salazar Slytherin. The new species is called Salazar’s spit viper.
wL4gW TIL that Europe has a native bison population! European bison were only hunted to extinction in the wild in the early 1900s and were eventually reintroduced in the 1950s. Mostly they live in Eastern Europe and the largest population can be found in the Białowieża Forest.
wD41 TIL Noah Webster(the same Webster of Webster’s Dictionary) decided American’s should be independent, so he changed the spelling of many words from their English counterparts.
XdO8 TIL The ‘Irish Giant’ Charles Byrne was so afraid that the surgeon John Hunter wanted his body dissection and display, he arranged to be buried at sea. Hunter snatched Byrne’s cadaver on the way to the burial, reduced Byrne’s body to its skeleton and put it in his museum where it still remains
0ddeA TIL during the Pascal-B subterranean nuclear test in 1957, a 2000lbs steel plate cap was thrown into the atmosphere at 150,000 miles per hour