32 Battalion (South Africa) — gnostek

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0132 Battalion fought in over 100 combat operations between 1976 and 1993, operating deep inside Angola and Namibia.
02Its soldiers were Angolan FNLA defectors; most were denied South African citizenship after disbandment in 1993.
03The battalion's white commanding officers included Commandant Jan Breytenbach, a former Recce who recruited FNLA prisoners directly from the bush.

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01Sputnik 2 had no re-entry mechanism; Laika was always going to die — the lie was about when.
02Her body orbited Earth 2,570 times before the craft burned up in April 1958.
03One of her mission engineers, Oleg Gazenko, publicly apologized for her death decades later.

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01The pronghorn's top speed of 55 mph is second only to the cheetah among all land animals.
02Its oversized trachea and lungs deliver oxygen at a rate far beyond what any current North American predator demands.
03The American cheetah, its evolutionary co-author, vanished with the Pleistocene megafauna around 10,000 BCE.

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01Cargill's annual revenues have exceeded $160 billion, surpassing the GDP of many mid-sized nations.
02Founded in 1865 in Conover, Iowa, the company has remained family-controlled for over 150 years.
03Cargill operates in 70 countries and handles an estimated 25% of all U.S. grain exports.

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Langton's ant after 11,000 steps. A red pixel shows the ant's location.

01The 'highway' pattern — a repeating 104-step diagonal corridor — emerges reliably around step 10,000.
02Christopher Langton described the ant in 1986; the highway emergence remains unproven from first principles.
03The ant is Turing-complete: given an infinite grid, it can simulate any computation.

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A thermite mixture using iron(III) oxide

01Thermite burns at 2,500 °C — hotter than the surface of most lava flows.
02Water poured on burning thermite causes a steam explosion, making it actively worse to fight.
03U.S. military M14 incendiary grenades use thermite specifically to destroy field artillery beyond enemy recovery.

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01Turnspit dogs worked in pairs, alternating hour-long shifts inside the wheel to keep roasts turning evenly.
02A preserved Turnspit specimen named 'Whiskey' is still on display at Abergavenny Museum in Wales.
03Once kitchen machinery replaced them in the 1800s, the breed was considered useless and died out within decades.

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01Unit 731's flea-breeding operation produced approximately 3 kilograms — around 45 million individual fleas — per week.
02Plague-infected rats were bred alongside fleas in dedicated Pingfang facilities staffed by civilian workers.
03The 1940 Ningbo plague outbreak, traced to a Unit 731 drop, killed hundreds within two months.

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01Kuwait's slant-drilling into the Rumaila field, shared with Iraq, gave Saddam his stated casus belli.
02100,000 Iraqi troops and 700 tanks crossed the border in the pre-dawn hours of August 2, 1990.
03US Ambassador April Glaspie told Saddam days before that America had 'no opinion' on Arab border disputes.

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