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TIL the longest lighting strike on record was 400 miles (700km) long, stretching from the Atlantic coast of Brazil into Argentina

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neYW7 TIL In 2018, American missionary John Chau illegally contacted the Sentinelese to preach Christianity, believing their island to be Satan's last stronghold, resulting in his death.
kO6wW TIL MRI studies show that the teenage brain is not an old child brain or a half-baked adult brain; it is a unique entity characterized by changeability and an increase in networking among brain regions
R7L06 TIL that Fidel Castro established concentration camps for gay people because he considered homosexuality as inherently counterrevolutionary and as bourgeois decadence
j6RGM TIL of the Stoned Ape Theory. The theory of how the consumption of psilocybin mushrooms led to a rapid increase of cognitive brain function, and ultimately the evolution from Homo erectus to Homo sapian.
KYr9J TIL Emperor Nero added events such as poetry, singing, acting and playing the lyre into the Olympics in 67 AD and declared himself the winner in all of them. He also 'claimed' victory in four-horse chariot race despite entering with ten horses and getting injured when he was thrown from his chariot.