"True education is a kind of never-ending story – a matter of continual beginnings, of habitual fresh starts, of persistent newness," said J.R.R. Tolkien. And it's true: there's no age cutoff for continually learning new things about the world. We can discover something new and interesting every single day.
This process has never been easier thanks to the Internet. We can learn new fun facts or interesting things from any field: history, languages, math – you name it. The Today I Learned subreddit is a wonderful place to share such not-so-common tidbits of knowledge with others. So check out our new selection of fascinating facts, pandas, and upvote those you find the most interesting.
#1
TIL in 1963, a 16-year-old sent a 4-question survey to 150 well-known authors (75 of which replied) in order to prove to his English tutor that writers don't intentionally add symbolic content to their books.Image credits: Calendar8
#2
TIL that instead of using his Make-A-Wish for something for himself, 13-Year-old Abraham Olagbegi used his wish to feed the homeless in his neighborhood for a year.Image credits: RealTheAsh
#3
TIL that women are traditionally prohibited from entering a sumo ring. This tradition is so strictly enforced that in 2018 two women were asked to leave the ring even though they were preforming CPR on a man who collapsed in one.Image credits: nickburrows8398
#4
TIL Winston Churchill had a doctor's note to drink "unlimited" alcohol in prohibition America (1932).Image credits: CheesyDogPizza
#5
TIL: A woman born with birth defects caused by Chernobyl including 6 toes, webbed fingers, no thumbs, leg 15cm shorter than the other, and missing some organs, won a gold medal in the paralympics for cross-country skiiing.Image credits: CapitalManufacturer7
#6
TIL Michelin started reviewing restaurants so people would travel farther and wear out their tires, increasing their sales.Image credits: julyninetyone
#7
TIL the CG director of Silent Hill, Takayoshi Sako, created all the game's cutscenes by himself. He used the office's 150 computers to render the scenes after all the other employees left for the night. He also slept under his desk and lived at the office for the 3 years it took him to finish.Image credits: SaltyPeter3434
#8
TIL the sun loses over 4 million tons of mass every second as energy.Image credits: Travellingjake
#9
TIL: In 1956, France banned the serving of alcohol to children under the age of 14 in the school canteens. Prior to that, school children had the right to drink half a litre of wine, cider or beer with their meals. In 1981 France implemented a total alcohol ban in the country’s schools.Image credits: diacewrb
#10
TIL Aretha Franklin required that she be paid in cash before any performance. The cash went into her handbag and the handbag either stayed with her security team or would rest on the piano during her onstage performance.Image credits: trifletruffles
#11
TIL that gooning is a form of legal kidnapping in the US where a parent can hire someone to kidnap a kid they think is troubled at night to bring them to boarding school or behavior modification facility.Image credits: InterestingPickle
#12
TIL that it is impossible to copy, scan, or Photoshop currency on most modern equipment. Modern copiers and scanners, as well as image processing programs, can identify patterns on the notes and will cease processing the image.Image credits: 99titan
#13
TIL that in his final years as US president, Woodrow Wilson was too sick to govern. His wife Edith kept his sickness secret, taking over so many duties she was essentially president. She hid Wilson's paralysis by covering his left side with a blanket.Image credits: RollingNightSky
#14
TIL A hiker was lost on a mountain for 24 hours and ignored calls, texts, and voicemail messages from rescuer teams because he didn’t recognize the phone number.Image credits: Algrinder
#15
TIL that Skoda test their car horns 150,000 times for the European car market. For the Indian market the horns are tested 500,000 times due to the increased use of car horns in India. One study carried out at major intersections in Indian cities found that a horn sounds every three seconds.Image credits: u/EssexGuyUpNorth
#16
TIL the FBI is recommending adblockers as necessary.Image credits: nakakapagpabagabag
#17
TIL in 2018 multiple Virginia towns banned trick or treating for anyone over the age of 12. For example, according to the Chesapeake, Virginia city code in 2018, violators could face a fine and up to 6 months in jail.Image credits: Sandstorm400
#18
TIL Ernie Hudson, who played Winston Zeddemore in the Ghostbusters movies, was rejected from a role in the Ghostbusters cartoons because they thought he didn't sound like Winston Zeddemore.Image credits: Cyrus-114
#19
TIL A breakthrough in kidney stone treatment will allow them to be expelled without invasive surgery, using a handheld device. NASA has been funding the technology for 10 years, and it's one of the last significant issues in greenlighting human travel to Mars.Image credits: Influence_X
#20
TIL that both Al Pacino and Robert De Niro are two of the oldest fathers on record, fathering children at the ages of 83 and 79 respectively.Image credits: greatmanyarrows
#21
TIL in the 1980s, NASA had a 1-900 number which charged $2 for the first minute and $.45 for each additional minute. It allowed callers to listen in on a mission status report and mid-flight press conferences, and thousands of them heard the Challenger explosion in real-time.Image credits: Forward-Answer-4407
#22
TIL in the 1950s Temple University and the City of Philadelphia disinterred an entire cemetery to expand Temple's campus and dumped 28,000 headstones into the river.Image credits: diatriose
#23
TIL of Natalia Grace, a 9-year-old orphan whose adopted parents claimed she was actually a 22-year-old sociopath.Image credits: Sebastianlim
#24
TIL that Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum awarded its 10th million visitor with the chance to spend one night in the museum alone. The winner slept underneath Rembrandt's "The Night Watch".#25
TIL calories in food are measured by exploding a dehydrated food in an oxygen filled canister surrounded by water. The explosion of the food item gives off energy that heats the surrounding water. The increase in temperature of the water is how we calculate calories.Image credits: jellypalmbear
#26
TIL Rockstar hired real-life gang members and ex-convicts in GTA V to voice some of the characters. They also gave them the freedom to improvise the script and say what they would say in real life, to make the dialogue more realistic and authentic.Image credits: Algrinder
#27
TIL Queen Elizabeth II and her husband were third cousins, both descended from Queen Victoria.Image credits: toafobark
#28
TIL average onset of menstruation for girls in 1840 was age 17. In 2000 it was 12 years old.Image credits: u/jumpedoutoftheboat
#29
TIL Walt Disney used shell companies and fake names to acquire the land in Orlando that would become Disney World in 1971.Image credits: Proper_Contest_4035
#30
TIL Tina Fey got her chin scar at age 5 when a stranger randomly entered her yard while she was playing and slashed her face.Image credits: SAT0725
#31
TIL real doctors from USC Medical Center were recruited to play the doctors who try to save E.T. because Spielberg felt that actors talking about technical medical matters didn’t seem natural.#32
TIL there is a town in Alaska called Whittier where nearly the entire population lives in one building along with all of the town's public facilities.#33
TIL Terry Pratchett had all his unfinished works destroyed by steamroller after his death.#34
TIL when Cleopatra and Julius Caesar met and subsequently became lovers, she was 21 and he was 52.#35
TIL one of the co-creators of Keurig machines was diagnosed with caffeine poisoning due to his daily 30 to 40 cup coffee habit.Image credits: radarthreat
#36
TIL it took 15 years and 5,127 prototypes before James Dyson shipped his first vacuum cleaner.#37
TIL Roald Dahl wrote "The Twits" because of his profound disgust for beards.#38
TIL that John F. Kennedy's patrol boat was rammed by a Japanese destroyer. After a 3-mile swim to an island, he and his crew survived on coconuts for 2 days. Rescued by two islanders, their message etched on a coconut shell became a paperweight on JFK's desk.#39
TIL An otter squeezed through gates into a classical Chinese garden at night in downtown Vancouver and ate 11 prized koi fish. Traps baited with raw chicken and salmon were set up but otter was never caught.#40
TIL it is virtually impossible to die from sinking to the bottom and suffocating if you get trapped in quicksand.#41
TIL the original draft of the film "Being John Malkovich" had nothing to do with the actor himself. Upon being pitched the film, New Line Cinema founder Robert Shaye asked "Why the f**k can't it be called 'Being Tom Cruise?", a question that John Malkovich also asked.#42
TIL Michael Schumacher donated $10 million to the victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. It was the highest individual donation made in the disaster that killed more than 220,000 people. Schumacher's bodyguard Burkhard Cramer, and Cramer's two sons, were killed in the tsunami.#43
TIL that philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once took mescaline and imagined himself attacked by sea creatures. For years afterward, he suffered from intrusive thoughts about crabs and persistently thought crabs were following him around.#44
TIL the former CEO of Nissan fled Japan in 2019 by hiding in an audio equipment box.#45
TIL During the 1800s, Hawai‘i became one of the most literate nations in the world with over 90% of the population able to read and write. Even King Kamehameha III proudly declared, “He aupuni palapala ko‘u” (“I have a kingdom of education”)#46
TIL that in 2009, hundreds of brightly-colored bird specimens were stolen from the Natural History Museum London. It was later found that a student had sold them online to be used for fly-fishing lures.#47
TIL that 80% of animals found in Madagascar exist nowhere else on earth.#48
TIL a sheepdog named Casper fought for over 30 minutes against 11 coyotes who were threatening his flock, killed 8 of them, and survived with a severe neck wound and a missing tail.#49
TIL 4000 luxury cars, including Audi, Porsche, Lamborghini and Bentley models, are at the bottom of the ocean after the ship Felicity Ace sank#50
TIL Louis Braille invented the braille system between ages 12-15 after having been blind 7 years due to an accidental self-inflicted injury at age 5 that resulted in his own blindness.#51
TIL in 2011, the Kellogg's brand decided to add Vitamin D to all of its cereals in the UK due to the fact that 1 in 5 people in the UK were deficient in Vitamin D. A study in 2021 showed that 1 in 6 adults in the UK have low levels of vitamin D in their blood#52
TIL: North Korea shot down a US spy plane in April 1969, an enraged Nixon allegedly ordered a tactical nuclear strike and told the joint chiefs to recommend targets. Henry Kissinger spoke to military commanders on the phone and agreed not to do anything until Nixon sobered up in the morning.#53
TIL that the majority of men in Germany sit down to urinate.#54
TIL that the man who authored the NIST manual on passwords and recommended password changes every 90 days regrets doing so. Mandatory password changes on a scheduled interval are no longer recommended by NIST.#55
TIL any person who succesfuly parachutes out of a failing aircraft is eligible to join the caterpillar club. You get a certificate as well as a caterpillar shaped pin and get to join their annual gatherings. People who escaped a failing aircraft with no parachute are denied entry.#56
TIL in WW2, when Germans captured a British bomber tail gunner who claimed that he had jumped out of his plane at 5500m without a parachute, they investigated and confirmed his claim and gave him a certificate to confirm his story.#57
TIL that an unplugged microwave carries enough residual current to kill you, even if it's been unplugged for months. So never try to repair a broken microwave unless you know how to discharge the capacitor#58
TIL when Rita Hayworth learned the atomic bomb that was scheduled to be tested at Bikini atoll would feature her likeness, she was offended. Her husband Orson Welles later recalled she was the angriest she had ever been thinking it was a publicity stunt orchestrated by the head of Columbia Pictures.#59
TIL that 61% of US troops killed in Vietnam were under the age of 21. The overall average age was 23.#60
TIL pilot callsigns are assigned to you by your "buddies", inspired from something stupid you did/say, your name, or your physical appearance. e.g. "Rat" for someone short and ugly; "Alphabet" if your name is too long; "Caveman" if you enjoyed survival training too much.#61
TIL that Cassowary meat is so tough that people were told to cook it with a stone in the pot. "When the stone is ready to eat, so is the Cassowary."#62
TIL In 2014, Swiss Air Force could not intercept a hijacked airplane because the incident happened outside their working hours.#63
TIL a man found a winning lottery ticket worth $24 million in an old shirt just two days before it expires.Jimmie Smith, a 68-year old New Jersey man who discovered a winning New York Lotto ticket in an old shirt hanging in his closet.
The ticket was purchased on May 25, 2016 and the winner had one year to claim the prize.
Smith checked his tickets in May 2017, after seeing a news story about the unclaimed jackpot.
He claimed his prize just two days before the deadline, on May 23, 2017.