Hannah Riley
Here’s a fun fact for you: everyone likes fun facts. If they don’t like fun facts, they’re not fun. Stay clear of those people. If you do like fun facts, you’re in the right place.
People on Reddit share all the interesting things they learn everyday on the subreddit called Today I Learned (abbreviated as TIL on Reddit). The community shares all the really interesting things they learned recently that their schooling seemed to gloss over.
Today I Learned is packed to the brim with non political and agenda-free interesting facts. It’s a cool place to hang out and learn things to impress a stranger with next time you’re trapped in an elevator with someone.
Here are some of the most interesting ones we found.
1.
TIL that In 2018, A hacker broke into people’s routers (100,000 of them) and patched their vulnerabilities up so that they couldn’t be abused by other hackers.
2.
TIL after losing her position in her university’s anatomy department in 1938, Rita Levi-Montalcini set up a laboratory in her bedroom and studied the growth of nerve fibers in chicken embryos. This work led to her discovery of nerve growth factor, for which she was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1986.
3.
TIL about the symbiotic relationship of wolves and ravens. Ravens will lead wolves to prey so that they can take a portion of the leftovers, play games of tail chasing with each other, and develop individual friendships.
4.
TIL:In January 1960, white jazz pianist Dave Brubeck canceled a twenty-five-date tour of colleges and universities across the American South after twenty-two schools had refused to allow his black bassist, Eugene Wright, to perform. He also canceled a tv show where they didn’t want to show him.
5.
TIL that when filming the TV series “The Mandalorian” in 2019, the crew ran out of Stormtrooper costumes, so they reached out to the local branch of a Star Wars fan organisation, whose members came to join the filming in their own home-made Stormtrooper costumes
6.
TIL that paper books still outsells e-books by a huge margin, even among young people.
7.
TIL Honeybee venom rapidly kills aggressive breast cancer cells and when the venom’s main component is combined with existing chemotherapy drugs, it is extremely efficient at reducing tumour growth in mice.
8.
TIL after Marcelo Bielsa became manager of Leeds United FC, he found out that the average fan had to work 3 hours to pay for a match ticket. He called his players together and made them pick up litter from around the training ground for 3 hours, to appreciate how the fans laboured for their passion
9.
TIL that in September 1945 Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett defied US restrictions and snuck into Hiroshima by train. Burchett was the first to tell the world about the effects of radiation on the victims of the bombing, which the US denied both before and after his story was published.
10.
TIL: there are otter gangs in Singapore who fight for territories. It is well followed by the locals and the press. Each gangs has names and reputations.
11.
TIL that A man named Göran Kropp from Sweden rode his bicycle to Nepal, climbed Mount Everest alone without Sherpas or bottled oxygen, then cycled back to Sweden again.
12.
TIL, That since domestication, dogs’ eyes have changed. Dogs now have eye muscles that make them more expressive and infant-like. These same muscles are absent in wolves, their closest relative.
13.
TIL African elephants often bury dead or sleeping humans or aid them when they are hurt. One woman fell asleep under a tree and woke to find an elephant standing over her gently touching her. As other elephants arrived they buried her under branches. She was found the next morning unharmed.
14.
TIL a Guatemalan boy saw soldiers come into his village and murder his parents along with the rest of the village, was adopted and raised in an abusive household by one of the men who massacred the villagers, and later gave testimony that sent the killer to prison with a 6,000 year sentence
15.
TIL a study from Yale found that kids who watched ‘Mr. Rogers Neighborhood’ retained more information than children who watched ‘Sesame Street.’ They also had a higher ‘tolerance of delay’, meaning they were more patient
16.
TIL Rome has major struggles with expanding the subway system in the city because diggers keep running into major archaeological finds. The Metro C expansion has been in the works for the past 40 years. It has unearthed Hadrian’s Athenaeum, a military complex, and an amphitheater.
17.
TIL firefighters that responded to last year’s fire at Notre Dame knew which works of art to rescue and in which order following a protocol developed for such a disaster.
18.
TIL in 1896, a bubоnіc plаgue epіdеmic struck Bombay, and the government asked Waldemar Haffkine, developer of the first chоlera vаccіne, to help. After 3 months of persistent work (1 assistant had a nervous breakdown and 2 others quit), a vаccіne was ready, with Haffkine tеsting it on himself first
19.
TIL that Suzanne Somers was fired from ‘Three’s Company’ for asking for equal pay with her male co-star, John Ritter. He was earning five times her salary.
20.
TIL the Make-a-Wish Foundation granted a child to visit the set of Thor: Ragnarok. When Thor sees Hulk enter the arena on Sakaar, the child said Thor should say “He’s a friend from work!”
21.
TIL that Kathy Sullivan, the first American woman to space walk, became in June 2020 the only person to have visited both space and the deepest place on Earth, the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench.
22.
TIL that a giant tortoise species was believed to be extinct for 113 years, only for it to be discovered again in Galápagos, 2019.
23.
TIL a field of seagrass converts carbon dioxide to oxygen at over 8x the rate of a forest the same size.
24.
TIL: Jim Carey used to get to do stand up in his 7th grade class. He used humor to fit in and his teacher made a deal with him – if he was quiet all day he would get 15 minutes at the end of class where he did stand up using material from life, the class, or doing impressions of faculty members.
25.
TIL: A research that analyzed the birthdays of all 20 million husbands and wives in England and Wales failed to reveal any evidence of attraction or compatibility between people of particular star signs.
26.
TIL after the 2011 earthquake in Japan, members of the yakuza gathered supplies and gave food to the victims. Some even opened their offices to people who couldn’t return home. Some people felt like their response was much quicker and efficient than that of the government.
27.
TIL America recruited 29 Navajo speaking men during world war 2, who later came to be called, Navajo code talkers. They had created a brand new set of code words in Navajo language, which even if intercepted could not be translated by the enemy forces.
28.
TIL that legendary Hollywood director Martin Scorsese, best known for his violent gangster films, has used the same female editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, on every movie he’s made since Raging Bull in 1980.
29.
TIL Carrie Fisher was a highly regarded Script Doctor; someone who does uncredited rewrites on screenplays. She did rewrites on Hook, Lethal Weapon 3 and The Wedding Singer among many others
30.
TIL James Earl Jones decided to go uncredited for his role of voicing Darth Vader because he considered David Prowse’s performance inside the Vader costume to be the more defining of the two performances.
31.
TIL Tchaikovsky had a patron who gave him enough money to quit his job and become a full-time composer. The only condition was that they never meet in person.
32.
TIL in 1935, in a newly built Sydney aquarium, a tiger shark vomited a human arm that belonged to a man that went missing recently. This sparked a murder mystery when it was discovered the arm was severed with a knife instead of being bitten off.
33.
TIL That Sri Lanka only became an island in 1480, when a cyclone destroyed the land bridge connecting it to mainland India.
34.
TIL that Tolkien wrote yearly letters to his children as if they were from Father Christmas. They started off as simple Happy Christmas letters but grew complex. They included a polar bear sidekick, the man on the moon, goblins, snow-elves, pictures, and he even developed an Arktik language.
35.
TIL Soviets realized the Americans and British were developing an atomic bomb when they noticed that Western scientists had ceased publishing papers on nuclear science. Correctly guessing that nuclear science had been made a state secret, they began their own program
36.
TIL the reason snow is able to absorb sound is because it is porous. Snowflakes are six-sided crystals, and they are filled with open spaces.Thosespaces absorb sound waves, creating a quieting effect over a blanket of snow.
37.
TIL In 1913, The Daily Mail suspected its competitor The Daily Standard was copying its news stories. The Daily Mail published a hoax article claiming the SS Waratah had been discovered in Antarctica. The Daily Standard also published the story and added a statement from the harbourmaster
38.
TIL that Eratosthenes, a Greek mathematician and astronomer (276 BC), measured of Earth’s circumference by using the shadow angles from the sun in two locations. He calculated it was 39,375 km, which is 1.4% less than the real number of 40,076 km
39.
TIL As a teenager, David Bowie was punched in the left eye. His eye was left permanently dilated. He later thanked his friend, George Underwood, for doing so, saying it gave him “a kind of mystique.” This mystique helped enhance some of Bowie’s most iconic images.
40.
TIL that Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) in 1963. Doctors predicted he had about 2 and a half years to live. Fortunately, the disease progressed much slower that the doctors expected. Hawking lived up to 76 years before dying in March 14, 2018.
41.
TIL a South African farmer rescued a baby hippo from a flood and gave it a home. The farmer fed him, brushed his teeth and helped him. The farmer was found dead with severe bite marks from the hippo. His body was submerged in the river where he rescued the hippo 6 years earlier
42.
TIL that for a while in the 2010s, you could rent the country of Liechtenstein on Airbnb for $70,000 a night. This included hanging out with the monarch, temporary currency, the ability to rename streets and a key to country.
43.
TIL that Jurassic Park’s visual effects were so groundbreaking to filmmakers that it inspired Peter Jackson to begin work on Lord of the Rings, George Lucas to start on the Star Wars prequels, and Stanley Kubrick to invest in his pet project, A.I (Artificial Intelligence). Jurassic Park (film)
44.
TIL Ketamine was given to boys trapped in a cave to keep them unconscious & to prevent them from panicking during their six day rescue
45.
TIL during the winter, people spend more time indoors with the windows sealed, so they are more likely to breathe the same air as someone who has the flu and thus contract the virus.Days are shorter during the winter, and lack of sunlight leads to low levels of vitamin D decreasing immunity to virus
46.
TIL according to Paul McCartney there is no mystery to who broke up the Beatles. John Lennon did. He called a meeting and said he was leaving the band.
47.
TIL Frank Sinatra died the night of Seinfeld’s finale and his ambulance made it to the hospital in record time because traffic was so light due to everyone watching the show.
48.
TIL that Kyrgyzstan is more distant from the ocean than any other nation. At a minimum of 1620 miles from any ocean, it is the most land-locked state in the world
49.
TIL Curry was introduced to Japan by the British. The British brought curry from India back to Britain. They then introduced it to Japan after it ended its policy of self-isolation. Curry in Japan is categorized as a Western dish
50.
TIL in 1749 a stage show was advertised a where a man would squeeze his body into a wine bottle. It was a bet between the Duke of Portland and the Earl of Chesterfield that they could advertise something impossible and get fools to pay for it. The sold out theatre rioted when no performer showed up.
