› added 3 months ago

21

TIL rats passed plague to fleas, who unleashed death across history. The Yersinia pestis bacteria clogged the fleas guts, making them ravenous but unable to swallow. Desperate, they bit wildly, vomiting infection into each victim. This unstoppable cycle of horror wiped out millions over centuries!

Read more history.com

via reddit.com

4k6yN TIL that during Star Trek filming, censors required actresses not to show their navels. Gene Roddenberry was so irked by this that he made the villains in his 1973 TV movie "Genesis II" identifiable by each having two navels, thus filming each navel he’d previously been forced to censor twice over.
5KRn TIL that in WWI, the Germans converted liner SMS Cap Trafalgar into an armed merchant cruiser, which they then disguised as the British liner HMS Carmania. Off the coast of Brazil, Trafalgar was attacked and sunk by a British ship. That ship was also an armed merchant cruiser; the real HMS Carmania.
x5n0 TIL that the longest game of chess, theoretical, is 5949 moves.
naNd TIL : When Voltaire (on his deathbed) was asked by priests to renounce the devil, he sarcastically replied, “This is no time to be making new enemies.”
xjy1 TIL that between 1533 and 1861 anal sex was punishable by death in England and Wales.