› added 1 year ago

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TIL about Weh Antiok Khosrow, a town whose name literally meant "better than Antioch, Khosrow built this." When the Persians captured Antioch in 540 they relocated the population to this new city. Khosrow wanted them to willingly stay so he built amusements like a circus for them to enjoy.

pKVZ TIL that comedy duo Key and Peele were auditioning for the same part when the director thought they worked well together
loGk1 TIL the US patent office actually granted a patent on Indian Basmati rice to the prince of Liechtenstein (an alpine European microstate), in a case of "bio-piracy." The patent was eventually revoked after an international outcry.
ADpNd TIL that an Austrian Diplomat writing an antisemitic book about the evilness of Jews came to a different conclusion before it was published, declaring that "antisemitism amounted to nothing more credible than fanatical religious hatred"
5YnVQ TIL of Operation Merlin where the CIA carried out a plan to send Iran flawed blueprints to a nuclear bomb in order to delay their nuclear program. They sent the blueprints by way of a defected Russian nuclear scientist who noticed the flaws and included proposed corrections to Iran.
mxkkR TIL of Aurora, an exascale computer that neuroscientists plan to use to make a map of the human brain, or connectome. The brain has more connections than the milky way has stars; mapping it would represent the single largest dataset ever collected about anything in the history of the world.