› added 4 months ago

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TIL in 2004, a starquake was detected, which was so powerful that if the star was located within 10 light years of Earth, it would have likely caused a mass extinction.

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Y7Bwr TIL: French was the official language of England for around 300 years.
JYMK8 TIL Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, devised a WWII plan to plant false info about the Allies’ next attack on a dead man, drift him at sea, and hope he’d be found by Nazi sympathizers. Operation Mincemeat worked, turning the tide for the Allies, who stormed Italy while the Nazis defended Greece.
M7RJW TIL there's a species of fruit fly whose sperm cells are over 2 inches long.
jNlPp TIL Susan Travers, the only woman ever to serve in the French Foreign Legion, waited until she was 91 to write her autobiography so everyone mentioned had already died
VBRYQ TIL Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was the first man to die during a space-flight. He volunteered to pilot a hastily built and fatally flawed spacecraft alone in order to save the life of the man who would replace him if he refused — his close friend and first man in space, Yuri Gagarin