› added 3 weeks ago

5

TIL that Equatorial Guinea’s first president, Francisco Macías Nguema, led a brutal regime that may have killed tens of thousands and reduced life expectancy to 30 years before being overthrown and executed in 1979.

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PYdgg TIL that swallowing pills without water can make it take longer for them to work, increase the chances of the pill to get stuck in your esophagus and in worse scenarios make an ulcer in your esophagus mucosa.
oRw08 TIL that Eratosthenes paid a guy to walk 800 kilometers to a tower to measure the length of it’s shadow & that’s how we found out the earth was round.
pB54 TIL, the church of Scientology planned and executed the single largest infiltration of the United States government in history.
DQdJe TIL the greatest peacetime maritime disaster is the sinking of MV Doña Paz in 1987 with 4386 dead, almost 3 times Titanic's casualties (1496). The greatest wartime disaster is Wilhelm Gustloff in 1945 (9343 dead).
9Y5Xp TIL the majority of pearls come not from wild mollusks, but from farms where grafts are inserted into mollusks as a base for the formation of these "cultured" pearls.