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TIL in Phantom of the Opera (1925) there is a mysterious prologue with a man holding a lantern talking. No surviving dialogue or title cards exist, and historians are unsure of where this scene came from

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wLWOo TIL of the Great Oxidation Event when bacteria evolved photosynthesis about 2.4 BYA, generating O2 as a waste product which changed the methane atmosphere, led to planetary cooling, triggered a series of ice ages, a mass extinction event, new minerals, and led to the evolution of multicellular life.
P1WxJ TIL in 1969, on Christmas Eve, the president of Equatorial Guinea Francisco Macias Nguema had 150 suspected dissidents executed in the national football stadium in Malabo with the executioners dressed as Santa Claus, while the amplifiers played Mary Hopkin's song "Those Were the Days".
BLOb TIL the Statue of Liberty’s star-shaped base is actually an old artillery fort built to protect the NYC harbor.
5WBp TIL that preventing an abort of the Apollo 11 mission has been attributed to the work of Margaret Hamilton, the lead flight software designer for Project Apollo. She was 31 when the lunar module landed on the moon, running her code, and is credited for coining the term “software engineering.”
v1G9D TIL that a marine scientist accidentally invented a way to make corrals grow 25-40 times faster, making large scale reef restoration a possibility