In 1537, England's King Henry VII officially declared February 14th the holiday of St. Valentine's Day.
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Astronomer Percival Lowell believed that he was the first person to observe canals on Venus, but because of a faulty adjustment of the eyepiece on his telescope, he was in fact looking at the blood vessels in his own eye.
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A man named Heraclitus had an illness that made his body swell up with water. To try to sweat it off, he buried himself in a steaming pile of animal poo, but then overheated and died of dehydration.
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It has been calculated that every 2 minutes, we take more pictures than all of humanity in the 19th century.
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The ‘@’ sign is centuries old, and was used in Europe to denote a unit of weight (the “arroba”) equivalent to 25 lbs.
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In 1518, a "dancing plague" struck Strasbourg, Alsace, whereby hundreds of people danced fervently in the streets over the period of a month. Some suffered heart attacks or strokes, and many others died from sheer exhaustion. It remains unexplained.
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In 1918, a homing pigeon saved over 190 American soldiers by delivering a message to nearby support despite having been shot through the breast, blinded in one eye, covered in blood, and with a leg hanging on by just a tendon.
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There is a 600 year old 240 paged book called the Voynich Manuscript, that’s written language is still completely unknown today.
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