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TIL the “pencil test” was used during Apartheid in South Africa to decide if a child got to grow up white or “coloured” (biracial). If your hair wasn’t curly enough to hold a pencil, you “passed” as white.

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4XddR TIL that in 2006, 20,000-year-old fossilized human footprints were discovered in Australia which indicated that the man who made them was running at the speed of a modern Olympic sprinter, barefoot, in the sand.
6EMwQ TIL During breeding season some ants grow wings to fly and procreate with different colonies... then once they're done the wings shed and then grow again next breeding season. However if they are no longer fertile, they won't grow wings ever again.
9wAlm TIL about Hitomi Soga-Jenkins, a Japanese woman who was abducted to North Korea with her mother in 1978. Her mother disappeared and was never seen again. She was given a Korean name and married an American defector. They had two daughters. The family returned to Japan in 2004 where they live today.
X06vD TIL the US Department of Justice sometimes hires "uncompensated" federal prosecutors. According to a WAPO article, to avoid a legal prohibition on providing "voluntary services" to the government, DOJ argues the services aren't voluntary, they're "gratuitous." Most of these unpaid AUSAs are women.
0rZM TIL Colombian drug trafficker Carlos Lehder bought himself an island in the Bahamas where he put an airstrip which controlled the drugs coming in from South America and entering the US. He became so wealthy he offered to pay Colombia’s foreign debt for amnesty