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TIL that during the Great Leap Forward, when Chinese sparrows were deemed a pest and tried to be exterminated, some of the sparrows found refuge at the Polish Embassy in Beijing. The Embassy refused to scare away the birds and was surrounded by people playing on drums causing the sparrows to die.

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ne087 TIL the first person to ever observe individual living sperm cells was Antonie van Leeuwenhoek who collected a sample from his wife immediately after intercourse. In his 1677 letter to the Royal Society, “de Natis e semine genital Animalculis,” he describes a scene teeming with tiny “animalcules.”
0dW4p TIL Italian artist Salvatore Garau created and put up for auction in 2021 an invisible sculpture called "Io sono", which means "I am". The sculpture was purchased by a private collector for 15,000 euros.
lo88V TIL Nina Simone, born Eunice Kathleen Waymon, had to change her name to disguise herself from family members, for having chosen to play "the devil's music"
1aRv8 TIL that British doctors performed a covert study of the length of time chocolates last on nurses' stations in hospitals, published in the British Medical Journal. They found that the 'decay rate' of the chocolates follows an exponential decay pattern with a half-life of 99 minutes.
Z8jVB TIL the Latin phrase Magnum Opus, that modernly refers to the greatest achievement of an artist or writer, was first used almost 2,000 years ago to describe the pursuit of the Philosopher's Stone, a legendary alchemical substance also known as the elixir of life.