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TIL birds cannot detect capsaicin (the active ingredient in chilli that makes it spicy) so it is used as a squirrel deterrent for birdfeeders.

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v1EWL TIL that female vampire bats share food with others in a complex lending system, where those that share regularly get more food and those that get but don't give food are punished by the group.
EeBW TIL of Timothy Dexter, who faked his own death to see how people would react. 3,000 people attended his fake Wake. After he deemed his wife hadn’t cried and grieved hard enough, he caned her.
VDeG TIL that the destruction under Genghis Khan may have scrubbed as much as 700 million tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere by allowing forests to regrow on previously populated and cultivated land.
KOd5R TIL that the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre have been held by one and the same Muslim family since 1517. This is a way of maintaining a neutral guardian of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, since the church is split between multiple Christian denominations.
9YNDB TIL that animal populations are growing in Chernobyl since humans left. Among them, a herd of Przewalski’s horses, the only truly wild horse in the world, introduced in 1998.