j6YMN TIL that in 2014, Civil War soldier Alonzo Cushing was awarded the Medal of Honor. Commanding an artillery battery against Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg, Cushing was disemboweled by a shell fragment. Holding in his intestines, Cushing continued giving orders until he was shot in the head. He was 22
0dLZR TIL In the 1883 Krakatoa eruption, multiple groups of human corpses floated from modern-day Indonesia across the Indian Ocean on rafts of volcanic pumice, washing up on Africa's east coast up to a year later.
grNay TIL the first major battle post WW2 involving the Italian Army took place at a pasta factory in Somalia in 1993.
LQKO9 TIL the "Y2K Bug" cost an estimated $500 Billion globally to fix. The preventative measures were so successful that widely predicted infrastructure failures did not occur, leading many to incorrectly believe the threat was never real.
b6Vva TIL - Viking age DNA reveals 9,000-year-old HIV-resistant gene originating near the Black Sea
QNpM6 TIL in Nanquan Town, Zhangjiakou, Hebei, China, there is a Festival of Lights tradition called Dashuhua (English: beating tree flowers) where local blacksmiths throw molten iron at a cold city wall to create "tree flowers." The tradition dates back to the Ming Dynasty when fireworks were expensive.
AN8Yn TIL that humans were present in the Philippines as early as 709,000 years ago, based on stone tools and butchered rhinoceros bones found in Kalinga, Luzon making it one of the oldest known human activity sites in Southeast Asia.
yVmOp TIL that in the Indiana Gas Boom of the 1880s, 90% of the gas was wasted in enormous “flambeaux” torch displays for advertising and public amusement. Within a couple decades, the gas ran out and the wells lost pressure, which also prevented most of the oil from being extracted.
m175o TIL Of Earth's estimated 15–30 million animal species, over 90% are invertebrates, they're animals without backbones and they live just about everywhere.
DQrer TIL that the tallest building in American Samoa (Aleki Sene, Sr. Telecommunications Center) is a mighty 40 feet (12 meters) tall. Out of the tallest buildings of each U.S. state and territory, the Aleki Sene, Sr. Telecommunications Center is the shortest.
vPJOx TIL of David B. Bleak, a combat medic and Medal of Honor recipient who killed four enemy soldiers with his hands.
J1ZwV TIL The Count of Estaing, best known for leading a French fleet during the American Revolutionary war, would be sent to the guillotine because of letters with the French Queen. Before his execution, d'Estaing wrote, "After my head falls off, send it to the English, they will pay a good deal for it!"