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TIL that in 1966, after a gas well in Uzbekistan burned for over three years, the Soviet Union used a 30-kiloton nuclear bomb detonated deep underground to crush the pipe and seal the leak by vitrifying the surrounding rock.

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w77M TIL identical twin boys were raised as a brother-sister pair (botched circumcision). The truth came when the one being raised as a girl INSISTED he was a boy; the parents admitted he was the subject of an experiment trying to prove gender identity was nurture, not nature. He later committed suicide.
JY6ZB TIL German culture has an extraordinary obsession with native Americans due to the wild west novels written by Karl may, the best selling German author of all times. Thousands of people are organized in clubs to “play native American life”.
LkMZm TIL of Dunbar's number, proposed by anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and avg. social group size. By using the avg. human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed humans can comfortably maintain only 150 stable relationships
54Zk TIL that US ski jumper Anders Haugen finished 4th at the 1924 Olympics, when 50 years later a Norwegian historian discovered a scoring error was made and Haugen should have gotten the bronze medal, which was handed to him in Norway in 1974 by the daughter of the original bronze medal winner
OGyXa TIL about the Venera Program (1961-1984), the Soviet space program that set a number of achievements in space exploration, consisting of sixteen probes made. Thirteen successfully Venusian atmosphere, and ten successfully made planet fall.