“Today I Learned”: 37 Times People Learned Interesting Facts…
Article created by: Edvinas Jovaišas
Article created by: Indrė Lukošiūtė
Today is an excellent day to discover something new. After all, few things are as enjoyable as learning and expanding your intelligence. And thanks to the internet — the endless stream of information that is literally at our fingertips — it has never been easier. You can constantly keep your brain busy with new things to think about and pump up that trivia muscle by adding new interesting facts to your arsenal of knowledge.
Whether it’s to improve your water-cooler talk skills or challenge your perspectives about the world, the ‘Today I Learned’ (TIL) subreddit is the perfect place to start. For years, the adventurous 28.4 million members of this community have been sparking our curiosity by sharing nuggets of wisdom they recently found themselves. So let’s take a look at what they have to teach, shall we?
Below, we wrapped up the newest batch of intriguing tidbits to get something useful out of our feeds. So grab your notebooks, put your thinking caps on, and enjoy scrolling through this list. Keep reading to also find our in-depth interview about the benefits of learning with international educational consultant Marilee Sprenger. Then upvote the facts you may not have known about, and be sure to pass on even more knowledge to us in the comments.
Psst! If you feel the urge to broaden your mental horizons even further, check out some more TIL goodness in our earlier pieces here, here, and right here.
TIL Eleanor Roosevelt held her own press conferences where only female journalists were allowed. This ensured they kept their jobs during Depression-era layoffs, earning a steady income & professional status
TIL that Billie Joe Armstrong once dropkicked a guy in the middle of a Green Day concert after he saw him roughing up a young girl. He stopped the show and challenged him to a fight before jumping into the crowd
TIL Charles Darwin’s personal pet tortoise (Harriet) didn’t die until recently at an estimated age of 175 years
TIL The Python programming language was named after Monty Python, not a snake
TIL Ostrich farms routinely have difficulties getting male ostriches to breed, because they often find their human caretakers more attractive than female ostriches
TIL in 1977 Indian painter, PK Mahanandia, sold his belongings and cycled 4,000 miles from India to Sweden to visit his love, Charlotte von Schedvin because he couldn’t afford a plane ticket. They got married in 1979
TIL that Nike created a pair of shoes that were so advanced, they were banned from the Olympics because they were considered as technological doping.The Alphaflys, or “the shoe that broke running”, as sports scientist Dr Ross Tuckercalled them, contain tech designed to deliver greater energy return
TIL Mount Thor in Canada has the world’s longest vertical drop. If you fell off it, you would fall for over a kilometer before you hit anything
TIL Andromachi Papanicolaou, the wife of the man who invented the Pap smear volunteered to have her cervix sampled every day for 21 years to help with his research. Their findings went on to save the lives of millions of women by preventing the development of cervical cancer through early detection
TIL landlords in Glasgow, Scotland tried to increase rent by 25% on women whose husbands were fighting in World War 1. The women organised a rent strike and stopped bailiffs entering their buildings by throwing flour bombs at them and pulling down their trousers
TIL that New Zealand author Janet Frame was falsely diagnosed as schizophrenic and was scheduled to be lobotomised. Several days before the operation, she won New Zealand’s most prestigious literary prize, convincing doctors to cancel the procedure
TIL about Janet Stephens, a hair stylist turned hairstyle archeologist. She visited a museum in 2001 and realized historians were wrong about hairstyles on Greek and Roman statues being wigs. She recreated the styles and published her findings in The Journal of Roman Archaeology
TIL John Steinbeck spent two months rewriting ‘Of Mice and Men’ after his dog ate the only copy of the original manuscript
TIL Salivating before vomiting is a way for your body to protect your teeth from the incoming stomach acid
TIL the BBC initially refused to publish Richard Dimbleby’s eye witness account of Belsen concentration camp in April 1945, they didn’t believe it was as terrible as he described. It’s estimated 70,000 people died at Belsen. The BBC only agreed to broadcast after Dimbleby threatened to resign
TIL Julius Chambers of the New-York Tribune had himself committed to an asylum in 1872, and his account led to the release of 12 patients who were not mentally ill, a reorganization of the staff, and a change in the lunacy laws
TIL in 2013 a surgeon in the UK was struck off and convicted of assault after branding his initials into two patients livers. It was only discovered when 1.6-inch (4cm) initials were discovered by another doctor on an organ that he had transplanted failed
TIL The Parthenon in Athens was largely intact for over 2000 years. The heavily damaged ruins we see today are not due to natural forces or the passage of time but rather a massive explosion in 1687
TIL about a woman named Iva Toguri (Tokyo Rose) an American woman who used her position to undermine Japanese propaganda during WW2. She was named a traitor to the USA , and arrested for treason,it took her 30 years to prove her innocence
TIL that dogs and cats have special taste buds geared specifically for water
TIL that The British Pound is the oldest currency in the world, it has been used for over 1,200 years and dated back to Anglo-Saxon era. Back then it equivalent to 1 pound of silver. One pound back then could buy you 15 cows
TIL that the religious group known as the Shakers are completely celibate and cannot have children, so they can only gain new members by converting outsiders. As a result, there were only two people in the last existing Shaker community as of 2020, although they gained a single new member in 2021
TIL that In 2018, Pope Francis married two flight attendants in an impromptu mid-air wedding on a plane during a trip to Chile. The couple had gotten married in a civil ceremony in 2010 but weren’t able to follow it up with a church service because of the earthquake in Chile that year
TIL – According to a 2009 Sports Illustrated article, 60 percent of former NBA players are broke within five years of retirement. By the time they have been retired for two years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress
TIL when a pilot ejects from their plane, the ejection seat manufacturer gives them a tie. The Ejection Tie Club is confined solely to those who have emergency ejected from an aircraft using a Martin-Baker ejection seat. There are over 6,000 members
TIL: The World’s Littlest Skyscraper in Wichita Falls was built in 1919. Remote investors were swindled by intentionally not indicating the units on the planned blueprints were in inches, not feet
TIL that humans have the highest daytime visual acuity of any mammal, and among the highest of any animal (some birds of prey have much better). However, we have relatively poor night vision
TIL in 2009 an American tourist was almost left behind by his transcontinental Australian train. He clung to the outside for two hours and 124 miles in only a t-shirt and jeans while the temperature dropped below freezing
TIL that a trio of drunken boys decided to sail out to sea looking for a girl they saw at a sports competition event. They ended up sailing for more than seven weeks and drifted 1300 km off course before being rescued by a tuna boat. They all survived by drinking beer, eating coconuts and a bird
TIL Microsoft held a mock funeral for iPhone because they thought the windows phone 7 was going to smash apple in sales
TIL that official temperatures used in weather apps are taken in shade, not under sunlight
TIL in the movie Arachnophobia, the largest spider was a bird-eating spider they named Big Bob, after Robert Zemekis. Big Bob was adopted by a crew member named Jamie Hyneman, who went on to host Mythbusters. The little ones were controlled using a hairdryer and lemon pledge spray
TIL Gloria Williams, who pleaded guilty to posing as a hospital employee and abducting Kamiyah Mobley from her mother’s arms in the maternity ward, was sentenced to 18 years, which was the length of time Mobley was separated from her birth family
TIL that a single engineer in the control room of NASA prevented the astronauts of Apollo 12 from aborting the mission seconds after launch. “Set SCE to AUX”, said John Aaron which saved the entire mission
TIL that in 1988 the FBI National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime (NCAVC) did a psychological profile of Jack the Ripper in time for the 100 years anniversary of the White Chapel murders. The FBI profiled Jack as male, 28-36 years old, most likely a butcher, mortician, or medical orderly
TIL male goats urinate on their heads to smell more attractive to females
TIL that production on “No Country For Old Men” was shut down for a day due to a large black cloud of smoke drifting into view. The smoke was coming from a pyrotechnics test on the set of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood”, which was simultaneously filming in the same town of Marfa, TX
