TIL: You Might Be Related to Genghis Khan | Today I Learned

2m read

·Nov 11, 2024

[Music] [Applause] [Music]

So you probably heard of the name Genghis Khan or Jengus Khan, but you might not realize that something like one in 200 men in the world were genetically related to Genghis Khan. So he was obviously very, um, prolific. Yeah, but it makes sense because it's not just him, but it's also his sons and all of his grandsons. They would wipe out enemies that weren't in their [Music] lineage.

There's more to this story than you thought. Genghis Khan was first motivated by a girl. According to the Secret History of the Mongol, this legend says he was betrothed to a young girl. They didn't talk to each other, but he went through this horrible period where his father had been killed, his horses had been stolen from him and his family, and then he was enslaved.

Through all this time, you know, over the years, she waited for him. One day, he escaped from all of this, and he went out and he found her. As he was riding along, these enemies showed up. She turns to him and she says, "You have to go! You have to run!" He rides off towards this mountain, and he's heartbroken. He prayed to Tangri, "What should I do? What should I do?"

The moment that he decided he was going to fight back, global history changed, for that was the very first fight that he ever had. He got her back, and within a single lifetime, he created the largest contiguous empire in human history from nothing, and it was all a love [Music] story.

I would say that he was, uh, very charismatic. Scientists thought that chameleons change color by changing the pigment in their skin. Not true! How they actually change color is far more complex.

Tuna Gods Sacrifice | Wicked Tuna

How Damaging is Radiation?

View All

Resurrecting Notre-Dame de Paris | Podcast | Overheard at National Geographic

[Music] I took a taxi there, and it was still dark when I got there. It’s kind of like entering a space station or something. You show up, shed all your clothes, put it in lockers, go through this vestibule, and you come out on the other side wearing a cl…

Example of shapes on a coordinate plane

So we’re told here the four corners of a rectangle are located at the points (1, 1), (1, 6), (9, 6), and (9, 1). Plot the four corners of the rectangle on the coordinate plane below, and they gave us these four points. We can move them around with our mou…

Weak acid–weak base reactions | Acids and bases | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy

Let’s say that HA represents a generic weak acid and B represents a generic weak base. If our weak acid donates a proton to our weak base, that would form A⁻ and HB⁺. To identify conjugate acid-base pairs, remember there’s only one proton, or one H⁺ diffe…

The History of Magic | StarTalk

What’s this with Escape artists? I never was as enchanted by that as others have been. When you’re talking about a escape artist, you’re really talking about Houdini and then a lot of knockoffs after that. Houdini, in the early 20th century, a man born in…

Finding derivative with fundamental theorem of calculus: chain rule | AP®︎ Calculus | Khan Academy

Let’s say that we have the function capital F of x, which we’re going to define as the definite integral from 1 to sine of x. So that’s an interesting upper bound right over there of 2t minus 1, and of course dt. What we are curious about is trying to fi…

The CEO Who Pays Employees to De-Locate From the Bay

I haven’t started with questions from Twitter before, but I feel like they kind of covered some of the initial ones I wanted to go off with, uh-huh. So maybe we should just go with those. All right, so the first one was from Ben Thompson, and he asked fo…

TIL: You Might Be Related to Genghis Khan | Today I Learned

More Articles