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406

TIL that birds are reptiles

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W7BBX TIL that the longest professional tennis match ever lasted a staggering 11 hours and 5 minutes over three days at Wimbledon in 2010, between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut.
ZpXQY TIL: People paid to have their mail delivered to them until March 3rd, 1863 when the US Congress established free mail delivery to cities. New York City delivered residential mail 4 times daily until 1940. NYC reduced residential mail delivery to once daily (due to high costs) in 1950.
v1Elj TIL: There is a book called "Shadows from the Walls of Death", a book that's not only extremely rare, but also very lethal due to its arsenic content.
YdeZ TIL that we can drink alcohol because of a gene which most likely helped human ancestors make the most out of rotting, fermented fruit that fell onto the forest floor.
e066b TIL that a number of private US universities (including Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, Pennsylvania, and Yale) had quotas on the maximum number of Jews to be admitted. In 1935, Yale's Med School Dean stated: "Never admit more than five Jews, take only two Italian Catholics, and take no blacks at all."