› added 2 years ago

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TIL about Zone Rouge, an uninhabitable area of land in France 1,200 square km large that in 1918 was deemed too damaged by lead, mercury, chlorine and arsenic shells from WW1 to be repopulated. At the current rate of recovery, it will take 700 years to make the whole area safe

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699Nw TIL that when deaf people experience stroke-related brain damage, they often lose the ability to sign in remarkably similar ways to the different forms of linguistic aphasia (difficulty speaking, forming words, sentences being nonsensical)
ep59k TIL of the Great Raft - a log jam that was over 175 miles in length. It was so massive it led to the formation of several lakes in Louisiana, shaped hundreds of miles of farmland around it, and took 5 years for the Corp of Engineers to clear in the 1830s.
prrO TIL the Paraguayan War was so catastrophic for the male population of Paraguay, there were only 26,000 adult men left alive in the country at the end of the war. In addition, the F/M ratio in some areas were high as 20:1.
OGMOg TIL that the iconic horses on the Kentucky licence plates in the 1990s were based on a logo of a horse park in Lexington which itself was based on a picture of semi-wild horses taken by a German photographer in the 1960s. The base was withdrawn when the photographer sued for copyright infringement.
ldQa TIL: The ‘Interplanetary Transport Network’ is a collection of gravitationally determined pathways through the Solar System that require very little energy for an object to follow.