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TIL Audrey Hepburn was a ballet prodigy as a child, but after five years of malnutrition due to German occupation during WWII, she was permanently too weak to dance, so she turned to acting.

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VBYX0 TIL when Christopher Columbus landed in Lisbon after his first voyage, Portuguese authorities demanded a report of his travels. Columbus refused and sent a letter full of misinformation to the king of Spain so that Portugal wouldn't get a headstart on invading the Americas if it was intercepted.
GYdRN TIL Graveyards for unclaimed remains are called "potter's field" because "potter's fields" were places where clay was harvested, and left with unfilled holes and barren soil. Historically, they were used as a cheap and efficient way to inter unclaimed human remains, on land nobody wanted.
b9BlN TIL that birds can see the Earth's magnetic field due to the presence of a protein in their retina called Cryptochrome(Cryp4)
mxMLE TIL considered today the worlds largest living organism is a grove of 47,000 Aspen which are basically clones of each other. Together they would weigh around 6,600 tons (5,987 metric tons). The General Sherman sequoia itself weighs just a few hundred tons less, a testament to the size of a sequoia.
l7YA5 TIL researchers at the University of Georgia have built a device named the "Wasp Hound", which contains a parasitic wasp species trained to recognize various odors like explosives or drugs. The wasps are tracked by a computer which triggers an alarm when enough wasps seemingly focus in on a scent.