› added 4 years ago

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TIL that Columbus, ship aground on the shores of Jamaica, told the natives that if they didn't give him more supplies, God would eat the moon. He knew an eclipse was coming. It worked.

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vPmNB TIL a physicist published his cat as a coauthor so he could write using first person plural without being criticized.
QNZjk TIL that in World War 2 Nazis used secret codes to communicate using a machine called the Enigma Machine which would use morse code but make it very, very difficult and there was a building in England where many people were recruited to work as decoders and it would take hours or days to solve.
lo9Ka TIL the queen parrotfish sleeps inside of a protective mucus bubble secreted from its mouth, presumably for hiding its scent from predators at night. The mucus bubble may also serve as an early warning system in the event that a predator, like a moray eel, tries to attack the resting parrotfish.
wLoXP TIL a Roman soldier farted which led to a riot and ended up killing 10,000 people
MeOy0 TIL photographer Kevin Carter, famous for his photo of a vulture stalking a starving toddler, committed suicide a few months after receiving the Pulitzer Prize for his photo. He told an interviewer that after snapping the photo, he “sat under a tree for a long time, smoking cigarettes and crying”.