› added 10 months ago

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TIL 2000 year old seeds not only were planted and germinated, but also reproduced.

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e0RV5 TIL that cruise ships can emit as much particulate matter as a million cars every day and the air quality on deck can be as bad as the world’s most polluted cities.
ZN04 TIL there was a massive solar storm in 1859 that sparked fires in telegraph offices. Were a storm of that size to hit today, it would knock out power grids for months or longer.
WknG4 TIL that George Newhall and Tom Yohe, co-creators of the "School House Rock" series of educational short songs, produced a similar series for NBC in 1978 called "The Metric Marvels" to teach kids about the metric system in support of the US' short-lived transition to metric.
X5gk TIL self-taught naturalist Ray Stanford shocked paleontologists by routinely finding hundreds of dinosaur prints in suburban Washington DC where only a handful had been discovered before. He has a unique ability to recognize patterns and abnormalities in rock. He also claims seeing UFOs in clouds.
Bprr TIL a Japanese Consul in WWII saved 6,000 Jews from Hitler by writing them all Visas to Japan even after the government told him not to.