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TIL the assassin bug wears the corpses of its victims like armor

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d878d TIL about the Battle of Camaron, where 64 French Foreign Legionnaires resisted to 3,000 mexican soldiers for a whole day long. The 3 last legion survivors, heavily wounded, refused to continue the fight at their own terms.
kO0Bd TIL I learned that the first effective syphilis cure, called Salvarsan, was created in 1909. An arsenic based drug, it operated on the same principle as chemotherapy: it poisoned the syphilis before it poisoned you. Like chemo it was very unpleasant, but a literal lifesaver.
yLWw TIL NBC’s Dateline aired a segment showing gas tanks on General Motors pickup trucks tended to explode on even low-speed impacts. G.M. responded with an investigation showing that Dateline had rigged explosions in the show by affixing model-rocket engines to a truck’s underbody.
AN9jn TIL that the Australian town Lightning Ridge got its name in the 1870s, when some passers-by found the bodies of a farmer, his dog, and 200+ sheep, which had been struck dead by lightning.
Lk850 TIL in 1991 two English pranksters took credit for many of Britain's crop circles, after an investigator declared one example "impossible for human beings to make". After some refused to believe them, Bower and Chorley started adding straight lines and squares to show they weren't natural.