› added 8 months ago

60

TIL that bullet trains in Japan were designed in 1940 & included plans to extend to Beijing and even Singapore.

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dDnZB TIL Abraham Lincoln became the first historical figure to appear on a U.S. coin when pennies were redesigned in 1909, in honor of the former president's would-be 100th birthday.
9YyoQ TIL obesity can impact the size of your brain.
jNerj TIL about the concept of 'invented tradition', in which something believed or touted to be ancient is actually modern, such as ancestral Scottish clan-tartans, which are actually a 19th-century creation.
OGYNe TIL The European 30 Years' War 1618 - 1648 began with Czech nobles throwing two Habsburg governors out of Prague castle window onto a huge dungheap. The corresponding carnage - fought over the issue of religious freedom following the Protestant Reformation - left millions dead.
ZpDda TIL that scientists believe the earliest known ancestor of humans (and many others), Saccorhytus, was about a millimeter in size and lived between grains of sand on the ocean floor 540 million years ago. It also had a very large mouth, but surprisingly no anus