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TIL that in 550 AD, the Byzantine Emperor sent two monks to China to smuggle silk worms out of there to avoid Persian control over the Silk Road. The monks hid the worms in their walking sticks, and the silk industry they started lasted for 650 years.

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8Z6G TIL IKEA Food is one of the largest food chains in the world. In 2016. IKEA served some 650 million diners a year, across 48 countries around the world. IKEA Food had annual sales of about $1.8 billion in 2016.
NXbn8 TIL: JFK was wearing a back brace which might have prevented him from ducking that second fatal shot.
MkD7 TIL that the movie Clerks was the first movie in history where the cost to license the soundtrack ended up being more than the production cost for the entire movie
P1nVO TIL you can have a negative magnitude earthquake. Magnitude calcs are based on logarithmic scale so a ten-fold drop in amplitude decreases the magnitude by 1. If an amplitude of 20 mm as measured on seismic signal corresponds to a magnitude 2 earthquake then 1000 times less (0.02 mm) is mag -1.
Y78XB TIL that George Rose, winner of 7 Tony Awards, was tortured and murdered by his adopted son and his family, and buried in an unmarked grave.