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To repel attackers, the bombardier beetle shoots a noxious mixture of boiling chemicals out of its bottom in a series of rapid blasts.

The National Health Service is the world’s 4th-largest employer after the US Defense Department, the Chinese Red Army, and Walmart.

Palm trees are a type of grass.

The seventh most common sentence in The Hunger Games trilogy is “they swallowed hard”.

In 2015, a town in North Carolina rejected a solar farm because residents believed it would “suck up” sunlight and kill the local plants.

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Sometime around 1500 BC, after being hit by a terrible earthquake, the residents of Crete tried to calm the earth by lowering a large basket of olives into a well.

About one in four animals on earth is a beetle.

In Tanzania there are 125,000 people for every doctor, compared to one doctor for every 156 people in Cuba.

Asteroid 1227 is called geranium.

Novelist Joseph Conrad’s real name was Teodor Józef Konrad Nałęcz-Korzeniowski. He became fluent in English only in his 20s. He never lost his Polish accent.

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