› added 7 years ago

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TIL the highest troop concentration in the history of counter-insurgency warfare was not in Iraq, or Afghanistan, but in Ireland, where the British stationed 20 troops for every 1000 civilians during the peak of The Troubles

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wLVEW TIL that scientists were able to use a spinach leaf as scaffolding to build a mini working human heart.
8a8kV Today I learned that when the Whittington brothers, of Le Mans 24h fame, bought Road Atlanta (the racetrack with the longest straight at the time in the US) in 1979, they used it to secretly land drug smuggling aircraft under the cover of darkness.
GYrZ7 TIL in 2001, Russell Crowe was the target of a plan by Al-Qaeda to cause "cultural destabilization" through the kidnappings of high-profile actors
VMrE8 TIL, the Monterey Cyprus only grows in two small regions near Carmel and Monterey CA. At one point it was a part of a larger forest that extended to the continental shelf.
vwPK TIL that Greece has been in a state of default for about half its modern history as a sovereign state