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TIL The center star of Orion’s sword isn’t a star; it’s the Orion Nebula and is the only nebula visible from Earth with the naked eye.

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a8V6b TIL that only Nintendo's founder knows what their name means.
1aK1V TIL the Guillotine remained the official capital punishment of France until 1981, the last beheading occuring in 1977
yVQ5M TIL that there is a large piece of a civil war cannon in the attic of 9 East Battery, Charleston, USA. It landed there when retreating confederates blew up a cannon and it was too heavy to remove.
WlkA Today I Learned about Adam Rainer. At the age of 18 he was 4 feet tall. He then suffered from a pituitary tumor and grew to 7 feet 2 inches by age 32. He is the only person in history to have been both a dwarf and a giant.
BnEx TIL that Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” is why we say “Merry Christmas” today. The phrase had been around before, but when the book was an instant hit in 1843 it popularized it right at a time when Christmas began to establish as an annual tradition again, so the phrase stuck.