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TIL that Sir David Attenborough is a member of the “Order of Merit,” in 2015. It recognizes distinguished service in the armed forces, science, art, literature, or for the promotion of culture. Only 24 (living) people can be a member at a given time

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Me4Gb TIL Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I A Woman" speech never contained that phrase. Truth was raised speaking Dutch in New York. Instead, a white woman retranscribed it 15 years later, embellishing her language to sound more like Southern slaves.
8LyL TIL When Henry Ford was shown newsreel footage of the Nazi concentration camps, he “was confronted with the atrocities which finally and unanswerable laid bare the bestiality of the prejudice to which he contributed, he collapsed with a stroke
gr61y TIL According to a 2009 study, the oldest words in the English language include “I“, “we“, “who“, “two” and “three“, all of which date back tens of thousands of years. The discovery was made by tracking the divergence of ancestral words into different languages with an IBM supercomputer.
pYQAZ TIL the CIA’s attempt to turn a cat into a $20 million spy ended when it walked into traffic five minutes into its first mission.
dD0lZ TIL the vast majority of the Earth's mantle is not magma but rather solid rock because of the extreme pressures. The viscosity of this rock is comparable to that of normal glass at room temperature, hence why plate tectonics only moves at speeds measured in centimeters per year.