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TIL Bear Grylls survived a free fall from 16,000 feet after his parachute failed to deploy

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rRkPM TIL One of the reasons satellite phones never became the 'norm' despite having almost universal network coverage is time delay. These phones communicate through geostationary satellites that are 30,000+ km above Earth, which causes a time lag while talking to someone on the phone.
epWog TIL the Senate of Rome outlasted the fall of the Empire and survived until the Middle Ages
EXM0 TIL that Eris, discovered in 2005, is more massive than Pluto and would have qualified as the tenth planet in the solar system, until its discovery prompted the International Astronomical Union to formally define ‘planet’ with a size cutoff that also excluded Pluto
VMwRG Today I learned that there are 1.4 billion insects for every human on Earth. If all the humans in the world got on one scale, and all the bugs in the world got on another scale, the bugs would weigh more.
x69xk TIL that despite over 30 witnesses to the 1955 murder of Lamar Smith, veteran and Civil Rights activist, in broad daylight outside the courthouse of Brookhaven, Mississippi, no witness - who included the local sheriff - would testify in the case, and so the crime went unpunished