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TIL that in 2006, a man named Gregory W. Nemitz legally claimed ownership of asteroid 433 Eros and sent NASA a $20 parking ticket for landing the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft on "his" property.

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d8MEd TIL that "Nguyen," the most common Vietnamese surname, is the 9th most common surname in the Czech Republic/Czechia.
mxMLE TIL considered today the worlds largest living organism is a grove of 47,000 Aspen which are basically clones of each other. Together they would weigh around 6,600 tons (5,987 metric tons). The General Sherman sequoia itself weighs just a few hundred tons less, a testament to the size of a sequoia.
M7Nx0 TIL a volcano caused the creation of Frankenstein. Indonesia's Mt. Tambora erupted in 1815, and the next summer was Europe's coldest on record. Shelley, Byron, & friends were on vacation but had to stay inside, so they came up with scary stories, such as "Frankenstein", and the modern vampire.
1avVD TIL that Roman Emperor Caligula once appointed his favorite horse, Incitatus, to the senate. Many think that this was because of Caligula's very known insanity, but there are suggestions that it was an elaborate prank to mock the senate and say that even a horse could easily perform their duties.
LLg9 TIL calorie counts in food labels are based on 19th century research, that has been dismissed since, as being vague approximations that don’t project the truth that the calories we get change considerably depending on the structure of the food, how it is processed, and the physiology of the eater