› added 4 years ago

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TIL that during the siege of Tyre in 332 BC, Alexander the Great ordered the construction of a kilometre-long causeway between the island and the Lebanese mainland that, in addition to facilitating the breaking of the siege, collected sediment and turned the island into a peninsula.

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GYjW5 TIL the closest relatives to Primates, aside from flying lemurs and treeshrews, are rodents and lagomorths (rabbits, hares, pikas)
XeZk TIL Alexander the Great was embalmed in honey.
Rp57 TIL 700 years ago a monk scraped off the ink of old parchment to write a new prayer book. Recent discoveries find that the paper he erased was a manuscript written by Archimedes that laid out the heart of Calculus thousands of years before Newton was even born.
8aWXb A boeing 747-400 type airplane with 6 million parts, 71 meters long, 64 meters wingspan and 270 kilometers of cable, weighs approximately 185,000 kilograms, of which approximately 75,000 kilograms is aluminum.
R7El1 TIL from 1923 to 1969, "American" was the sole official language of Illinois.