It’s always a good day to learn something new. And thanks to the abundance of information we are constantly bombarded with, both on social media and TV, we don’t need to lift a finger for it. Unless scrolling counts. But how many of these claims, arguments and statements we read are true and how many of them are bogus? After all, we’re constantly reminded to have an inner skeptic in charge of fact-checking things and taking them with a pinch of salt.
Alternatively, we can trust the Reddit powerhouse, everyone’s beloved destination for the most random facts, known as “Today I Learned.” With a mind-blowing 27.1 million members, it’s home to a seemingly never-ending collection of specific facts shared by people who just learned them and shared on there.
According to their rules, the sub does not accept facts that are “inaccurate/unverifiable/not supported by source” as well as posts that are “misleading claims and omit essential information.” They also say they don’t support opinions and subjective posts as well as posts that are too general.
So scroll down through the latest TIL selection below, and be sure to check out our previous posts with more random facts when you’re done here, here and here.
#1
TIL Martin Luther King Jr was a huge fan of Star Trek. He loved that it showed a future with people of all colors working together in harmony. He bumped into Uhura, Nichelle Nichols, at a convention. She said she was quitting. She ended up staying after MLK urged her to, saying she was a role model.
Image credits: SonOfQuora
#2
TIL Hisako Koyama, a female Japanese astronomer who hand drew sunspots every day for more than 40 years. Her detailed sketches aid researchers in studying solar cycles and the sun's magnetic fields.
Image credits: u/Specialist_Check
#3
TIL in 2009 Burger King ran the "Whopper sacrifice" campaign, which gave a free whopper to anyone who deleted 10 friends on Facebook. Facebook suspended the program because Burger King was alerting people letting them know they'd been dropped for a sandwich.
Image credits: sedelpha
#4
TIL that Ethiopia has a unique calendar which is 7-8 years behind the rest of the world. The current year in Ethiopia is 2014.
Image credits: Pleeb
#5
TIL that Mississippi did not make child-selling illegal until 2009, after a woman tried to sell her granddaughter for $2,000 and a car and it was discovered that there was no law to punish her under.
Image credits: ob-With-One-B
#6
TIL Thought destroyed by Nazis, a priceless mosaic owned by Roman emperor Caligula ended up as a coffee table for 50 years in a NYC apartment.
Image credits: Specialist_Check
#7
TIL an FBI whistleblower reported multiple problems in forensic cases. After years of the FBI seeking to ruin him, his claims were investigated and a report showed that forensic hair analysis was flawed or inaccurate over 90% of the time.
Image credits: marmorset
#8
TIL a female reporter attempted to recreate the famous novel "Around The World In 80 Days". Not only did she complete it with eight days to spare, she made a detour to interview Jules Verne, the original author.
Image credits: res30stupid
#9
TIL that 1604, King James I wrote ‘A Counterblaste to Tobacco’, in which he described smoking as a ‘custome lothesome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs.
Image credits: vrphotosguy55
#10
TIL that an average of 2 amputations occur weekly at US meatpacking plants.
Image credits: thinkofanamefast
#11
TIL that Loving Day in June celebrates the day that Interracial Marriage became legal in the US.
Image credits: sephstorm
#12
TIL 2010 Vancouver luge gold medallist Felix Loch had his medal melted into 2 discs and gave one to the parents of a deceased competitor who died in a practice run on the day of the opening ceremony.
Image credits: Nose_Beers_85
#13
TIL the way the sun "gives" people vitamin D is by converting cholesterol in the skin to vitamin D.
Image credits: jellyculture
#14
TIL that since Brazil could not afford to send a team to the 1932 Olympics, they sent the athletes on a ship full of coffee. The athletes sold the coffee along the way to fund their journey.
Image credits: frosted_bite
#15
TIL that breast milk can adapt to a babies' illness and produce more milk with illness-specific antibodies.
Image credits: kimcpi
#16
TIL of The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902. The French wanted rats exterminated from the sewer system. They set a bounty for each dead rat tail. Thousands of tails were submitted per day but the rat problem only grew worse. They found the hunters were breeding, not hunting, rats for their tails.
Image credits: grandlewis
#17
TIL that In World War II, British spies plotted to spike Hitler's food with oestrogen to make him less aggressive.
Image credits: m3antar
#18
TIL that Tarzan actor and Olympic swimmer Johnny Weismuller and his brother were swimming in Lake Michigan when they saw a boat capsize. They pulled at least 14 people from the water, and 11 of those people survived.
Image credits: afeeney
#19
TIL in 1970 Robert White successfully transplanted the head of a rhesus monkey onto another decapitated monkey. It survived for eight days, able to smell, hear, see, and move its mouth. But it was paralyzed from the neck down, as White was unable to reconnect the severed spinal cord.
Image credits: SojourningCPA
#20
TIL a man in San Francisco deposited a junk mail check written for $95,000 dollars, received the money, and built a career off of the event.
Image credits: iamtherealandy
#21
TIL The Big Ben's unique tone is because the bell had cracked in 1859, barely two months after its inauguration. The bell is since oriented in such a way the hammer doesn't strike the 'crack'.
Image credits: whomDev
#22
TIL Brendan Fraser is the first American-born actor to be inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame.
Image credits: literally12sofus
#23
TIL about the liking gap, which is that people you meet like you more than you think. Psychologists found that "people systematically underestimated how much their conversation partners liked them and enjoyed their company."
Image credits: nickmac22cu
#24
TIL Thankful Villages (also known as Blessed Villages) are those few villages in Britain to which suffered no casualties in the First World War. These villages had lost no men in the war because all those who left to serve came home again when war ended.
Image credits: Four_Minute_Mile
#25
TIL that in the 1950s, a psychiatrist had three paranoid schizophrenic patients who each believed they were Jesus Christ. He put them in a room together to see if their beliefs would change after confronting each other. They did not, in fact, change their beliefs but each individually came to the conclusion that the other two men were insane. They made a movie about it, called Three Christs.
Image credits: brother_
#26
TIL that French schools used to assign 'Le Symbole' to kids caught speaking minority languages (i.e. Breton, Occitan, Basque, etc). The only way to rid oneself of the symbol is to snitch on a fellow student. At the end of the day, the student with the symbol will receive some form of punishment.
Image credits: DylTyrko
#27
TIL More than 30 million viewers in Britain tuned in to watch the BBC “Royal Family” documentary in 1969, such that during the intermission, the flushing of toilets all over London caused a water shortage.
Image credits: blu3r3dgr33n
#28
TIL: In 2020, Colombians shipped 130 grams of cocaine to Italy, inside individually hollowed out coffee beans. They were caught when a customs official noticed the "sender" shared the same name as a mafia boss in John Wick.
Image credits: OvidPerl
#29
TIL that to save the Hawaiian culture and people from disappearing, Kalākaua, the last king of the Hawaiian kingdom, went on a world tour in 1881, and travelled to Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, and he became the first reigning monarch to circumnavigate the globe.
Image credits: Jay21-1-10
#30
TIL until the mid-1990s the Italian-American mafia controlled trash collection in New York City, fixing prices by extorting or murdering competitors or requiring them to join the price-fixing cartel. After an undercover operation convicted the leaders, trash collection costs dropped by $600 million.
Image credits: SojourningCPA
#31
TIL President Harding literally saved the U. S. Constitution which was deteriorating improperly stored at the State Dept. He had it preserved in a glass case.
Image credits: 5oclockpizza
#32
TIL that Paul McCartney is the only artist to reach the top of the UK charts as a solo artist, duo, trio, quartet, quintet and musical ensemble.
Image credits: RickDavenportYouTube
#33
TIL that in the early days of crossword puzzles, the game became an object of cultural hysteria. Newspapers and magazines from the 1920's - 1930's warned of a “crossword craze” gripping the country’s minds. The trend was described as an “epidemic,” a “virulent plague,” and a “national menace.”
Image credits: hidude100
#34
TIL a grown cat can jump between 5-8 times it's height. That would be the equivalent of human ability to jump from the ground up to 3rd or 4th floor!
Image credits: PrimeTomato
#35
TIL that Willie O'Ree, the first black man to play in the NHL, was blind in one eye. It was caused by a ricocheting puck that hit him in the face when he was 18 and he kept it a secret for his entire 21-year career.
Image credits: FuriouSherman
#36
TIL Finland used a lot of resources and logistics during WW II to bring the fallen to their home parishes for a proper funeral, instead of using mass graves in the battlefield.
Image credits: MFromBeyond
#37
TIL of The Golden Spruce, a 300 year old, 170ft tall, Sitka spruce with a rare genetic mutation that gave its needles a golden color. It was a sacred symbol of the Haida people of British Columbia. It was cut down by Grant Hadwin, a forest engineer, as an act of protest of the logging industry.
Image credits: Spongebobnudeypants
#38
TIL that In Wisconsin, children are legally allowed to drink alcohol in bars and restaurants or at home as long as they are with a parent or guardian.
Image credits: CrimeCrisis
#39
TIL Male honeybees,called drones, soul purpose is to mate with the queen bee, if they get the chance to mate they die right after. Despite not really doing anything else in the matriarchal hive they are vital for survival of the species.
Image credits: franticallyaspaz
#40
TIL the 700 3rd class passengers on the titanic all had to share two bathtubs. One for men and one for women.
Image credits: thenewyorkgod
#41
TIL a study found significant increase in green biomass over 40% of the planet from 1982 to 2015, while a significant decrease in vegetation was seen in only 4% of the surface.
Image credits: SAT0725
#42
TIL that the work of Charles Drew, a pioneer in preserving blood, led to large-scale blood bank use, U.S. blood donations to Britons in WWII, and the use of bloodmobiles. He resigned as chief of the first American Red Cross blood bank over a policy that separated the blood of black and white people.
Image credits: RedditPrat
#43
TIL: Migraines are 3 times more common in women than in men.
Image credits: CaptCash
#44
TIL in the 1980s, the last 29 Guam kingfishers were captured in an effort to save the species from total extinction caused by non-native brown tree snakes. Through the dedicated effort of zoos, there are now 140 around the world with the aim of reintroducing them back to the wild one day.
Image credits: blueberrisorbet
#45
TIL that Poppy flowers became associated with the military after a Canadian poet was inspired by a field of poppies near a mass grave in Belgium following World War 1. The poppies grew there after the bombing and trench warfare churned up the soil, exposing dormant poppy seeds to the sunlight.
Image credits: TheTriviaPage
#46
TIL there have been at least 600 polar bears that have made the swim/ice drift to Iceland since the settlement of the island.
Image credits: idiocrites
#47
TIL Emerson Romero was a silent film actor who was deaf. When movies with sound were invented, deaf actors got less roles and the intertitle text was removed. This led him to make an early form of movie captioning in 1947 so that movies would still be accessible to deaf people.
Image credits: dilettantedebrah
#48
TIL the US-Canada border is the longest international border in the world, and that Alaska's portion alone is about 38%.
Image credits: 2BallsInTheHole
#49
TIL that dolphins will come together to form mega-pods which can consist of over 10,000 dolphins.
Image credits: Kuriboh1378
#50
TIL Leonard Nimoy refused to join Star Trek the Animated Series without George Takai and Nichelle Nichols claiming they were proof of ethic diversity in the 23rd century.
Image credits: Aluliman
#51
TIL Unilever and Procter & Gamble have been fined $456M for fixing washing powder prices in 8 European countries in 2011. The fines were discounted by 10% after the 2 industry giants admitted running a cartel. Their rival Henkel, who provided the tip-off, was not fined in return.
Image credits: DreGu90
#52
TIL in 1997 a small Texas community tried to replace "Hello" with "Heaven-o" citing religious reasons.
Image credits: OPmeansopeningposter
#53
TIL about the woman who was hanging out with friends at the American Legion in a small Minnesota town. Her car slid off the icy road into a ditch. Trying to walk to a friend's house, she ended up freezing (solid!) in her friend's yard. She lived, was fine actually, and still lives in Minnesota.
Image credits: Shavered22
#54
TIL the nurse treating Anthony Perkins for facial palsy secretly took his blood samples and tested them for HIV and it was positive. Anthony didn't know he had HIV and found out in a grocery checkout line after the nurse shared the results with The National Enquirer.
Image credits: AudioCinematic
#55
TIL The frontal lobe is the first part of the brain to atrophy, causing difficulty in inhibiting irrelevant or inappropriate thoughts.
Image credits: FredCole918
#56
TIL Thomas Edison was so upset with his son’s ineptitude in business, that he paid him $35/wk to use a different name (Jr to then use Thomas Willard).
Image credits: aim179
#57
TIL when Charles Darwin was sent some flowers from a friend he noticed one flower was extremely long and bet some moth with really long mouth parts exists to pollinate it. A few years later that moth was discovered.
Image credits: DriveGenie
#58
TIL in 2010 a PA high school was caught spying on students in their home by remotely enabling webcams on school-issued laptops.
Image credits: fdboostssuck
#59
TIL a 19 year old East German stole a 10 ton Soviet armored personnel carrier and drove full-speed into the Berlin Wall, got caught in barbered wire and shot twice before West German bar patrons rescued him.
Image credits: The_pun_fart
#60
TIL the Ohio State Reformatory, which famously appeared in The Shawshank Redemption, was scheduled to be demolished after filming. However, it became a tourist attraction, and a group of enthusiasts later bought the site from the state for one dollar.
Image credits: ohmahjah
#61
TIL that if you fell asleep during a Puritan church service you would be poked by a long wooden pole.
Image credits: arintj
#62
TIL Joseph Stalin was covered in scars from the smallpox that he’d survived at the age of seven and had official photos portray his face as smooth and fresh with well maintained hair by heavily editing and retouching photos.
Image credits: 33Fatalities
#63
TIL Wayne Gretzky's stats were so far ahead of his peers' that if you cut his entire career number in half he's still one of the top 20 players of all time.
Image credits: DriveGenie
#64
TIL Britain's consent was required for America's nuclear bombing of Japan, due to a treaty on nuclear research during WWII.
Image credits: StupidGlasses
#65
TIL in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Spielberg wanted gestapo agent Toht to be a cyborg with a metal arm that could transform into a flamethrower and machine gun. Lucas rejected these ideas as being too far-fetched.
Image credits: wiftebzwifteb
#66
TIL the Kimberley Process, by which diamonds are certified as "conflict-free", has been largely abandoned as ineffective. Due to corruption and smuggling it is essentially impossible to tell if a gem is a blood diamond or not.
Image credits: AirborneRodent
#67
TIL Less than half the population can actually smell asparagus pee.There are two separate genes at work here. One is the gene that causes smelly asparagus pee. The second is the gene that allows you to smell it. So it’s possible you can have smelly pee and not smell it, or smell others’ but not have smelly pee yourself.
Image credits: nagitoe_
#68
TIL of Ahmed Best, the actor who portrayed the character Jar Jar Binks in the Star Wars prequel movies. Jar Jar Binks quickly became the most hated character in the Star Wars universe. The vicious backlash against the character left him contemplating ending his life.
Image credits: ArgumentBotRussia
#69
TIL Black Panthers are not a real species. They are jaguars and leopards who have “Melanism”, which causes them to have black skin. It's the opposite effect of having albinism.
Image credits: VinumNoctua
#70
TIL in 1989 a Soviet pilot ejected from a Mig-23 fighter jet over Poland after experiencing technical problems. The jet continued to fly on autopilot for 600 miles before running out of fuel and crashing into a house in Belgium, killing its occupant.
Image credits: yayyemen
#71
TIL in 1999, financial analyst Harry Markopolos had informed the SEC that he believed it was legally and mathematically impossible to achieve the gains Bernie Madoff claimed. It took four minutes to conclude that his numbers did not add up, and another minute to suspect they were fraudulent.
Image credits: girlsareCREAMY
#72
TIL The Mummy (1999) helped Universal studios gross over one billion dollars in home video sales.
Image credits: kalash_and_beer
#73
TIL about george hensley, who travelled the US to spread religious ideas of the divine healing powers of snake bites. George died in 1955 as a result of a snake bite, the state of kentucky subsequently passed laws prohibiting snakes from being used for religious purposes.
Image credits: MilchMensch
#74
TIL Catacomb saints are skeletons exhumed from Roman catacombs and decorated with gold and jewels to serve as "replacement relics" for those destroyed during the Protestant Reformation. It is unlikely that any of those skeletons are actually of the people they are reputed by tradition to be.
Image credits: LPercepts
#75
TIL in 2018 Barnum Animal Crackers freed its mascot animals from their cages, after 116 years of using the prior art design.
Image credits: AnthillOmbudsman
#76
TIL Most of North America's earthworms are not native, the native earthworms were killed of by an ice sheet around 10000 years ago. Most earthworms in North America today were descended from those introduced by settlers in the 18th century.
Image credits: Certified_Cichlid
#77
TIL that Native Americans also used Alcatraz as a prison.
Image credits: CrispitoDay
#78
TIL about Vulture Bees, who instead of collecting nectar, collect the flesh from rotting carcasses and produce a "decay-resistant edible glucose product resembling honey", aka Meat Honey.
Image credits: Hydra_Lord
#79
TIL that unlike most animals, goats have excellent object permanence and are able to remember where objects are hidden without being able to see or smell them.
Image credits: BringsHomeBones
#80
TIL we thought dolphins couldn't breathe through their mouths until 2016, when a dolphin with a damaged blowhole learned to mouth breathe.
Image credits: Gintian
#81
TIL during his two years playing major league baseball John Miller hit a home run in his first ever at bat, and his last ever at bat, and those are the only two home runs of his entire MLB career.
Image credits: Sorripto
#82
TIL Charles Guiteau, the assassin of US president James A. Garfield, was rejected from a utopian group marriage community, and they nicknamed him Charles Gitout. The community eventually became the Oneida silverware company.
Image credits: Gecko99
#83
TIL Jeff Cohen who played Chunk, the chubby kid in the Goonies went on to study law and entertainment law later co-founding the Cohen & Gardner firm in Beverly Hills. Earlier he asked Goonies director R.Donner for a recommendation for his college application Donner and his wife offered to pay for it.
Image credits: befarked247
#84
TIL 2 boys from California ran away from home ending up living in the Canadian wilderness. They then received aid from residents of a nearby town until their parents saw them on a news report. They had been "missing" for 10 months.
Image credits: madman1101
#85
TIL that the New York Times Best-Seller list is not a mathematically objective factual content based on sales figures, but editorial content protected under the US constitution as free speech.
Image credits: dodli
#86
TIL that when a Concorde crashed in 2000, it came within 30 feet of hitting a plane carrying the French president.
Image credits: stuart2202
#87
TIL That mangos and cashews are part of the poison ivy family.
Image credits: AotearoaCanuck
#88
TIL in 2014, the French drank over 162 million bottles of champagne (or nearly 3 bottles per person). The rest of the world shared the 145 million bottles of champagne that were exported.
Image credits: tossinthisshit1
#89
TIL it’s a myth that any amount of alcohol consumption kills brain cells and the quantity required to actually kill a brain cell would also kill you. Instead, alcohol does harm dendrites, which are the branch-like ends of brain cells that are key for passing messages from one neuron to another.
Image credits: its-classic-rando
#90
TIL about Joyce Vincent and English woman whose death went unnoticed for more than 2 years. Her skeletal remains were found in her bedsit flat with the TV still on and wrapped Christmas presents surrounding her.
Image credits: hydromies
#91
TIL some states have "Dead red" laws, which, if you're on a motorcycle or moped that is too light or not large enough to trip the sensor that changes the light from red to green, you're legally allowed to run the red light after waiting a reasonable amount of time.
Image credits: Jame_Gumball
#92
TIL in 2011, a 16 year old teenager repelled down into a San Francisco dealership and stole Guy Fieri’s Lamborghini.
Image credits: WorkingContext
#93
TIL Queen Elizabeth II is the only currently active military commander who also served in World War II. She remains the Supreme Military Commander for various militaries including UK and Canada. While she has full power to direct the military, she normally delegates.
Image credits: unknown
#94
TIL Gucci was accused of evading taxes on more than 1 billion euros in revenues between 2011 and 2017. Its owner Kering, which has denied avoiding tax, agreed to pay $1.4B in 2019 to settle the dispute, which was the highest ever agreed settlement by a company with Italian tax authorities.
Image credits: DreGu90
#95
TIL about the lost village of Tryweryn. A Welsh village and one of the last predominantly welsh speaking communities, that was forcibly vacated destroyed, and purposely flooded by the British government in 1965 in order to create a reservoir to provide water for the English city of Liverpool.
Image credits: Ourkidof91
#96
TIL San Marino has two heads of state at once (a diarchy). The heads of state, called "Captains Regent" serve 6-month long terms. They currently have the youngest head of state in the world at 27 and have had a more female heads of state than any other nation with 18.
Image credits: ownmonster3000
#97
TIL that "Ding Dong School," the first U.S. preschool TV show, was canceled when its star refused to let the network broadcast ads for BB guns.
Image credits: TheLittleLauren
#98
TIL that there is a Polish soup called czernina that's made with duck blood and other ingredients. Traditionally, this soup was served to men who were rejected after asking for permission to wed their significant other.
Image credits: dilettantedebrah
#99
TIL that in 2017, the Voyager 1 spacecraft successfully fired its backup thrusters for the first time in 37 years.
Image credits: winkelschleifer
#100
TIL when the United States officially transitioned from analog to digital television on June 12, 2009, "1.75 million Americans were still not ready" resulting in 317,450 calls to the FCC on June 13. Coupons from the Dept. of Commerce were given out, to be exchanged for DTV Converter Boxes.
Image credits: CaptainJZH
#101
TIL Paul McCartney was arrested in Japan in 1980 for possession of 219 grams of marijuana.
Image credits: ahjumTaeng
#102
TIL that the CIA hired a magician named John Mulholland in the 1950s to write a "magic book" for spies. The manual explained how spies could use skills like sleight of hand to poison an enemy's drink, or to steal documents. Mulholland was also employed by the CIA to explore paranormal activities.
Image credits: TheTriviaPage
#103
TIL one of the original drummers for The Ventures dropped out because he was too young to perform gigs at nightclubs. He went on to become a 4-Star General in the US Air Force.
Image credits: Glinth
#104
TIL “Stone Cold” Steve Austin decided on his frosty prefix because his then English wife once told him to drink his tea before it got “stone cold”.
Image credits: tyBollox
#105
TIL there is a stable population of rhesus macaque monkeys in central Florida. They were released on an island in a swamp as part of a jungle cruise attraction in 1938, but escaped the island because the tour operator didn’t know they could swim.
Image credits: GhostPartyArctica
#106
TIL that Tommy Wiseau named the character of Mark in "The Room" after Matt Damon, but he misheard Matt as Mark.
Image credits: Zestyclose-Court-265
#107
TIL Elmo from Sesame Street testified before a House of Representative subcommittee, and he was referred to as “Elmo Monster” and “Mr. Monster".
Image credits: sisyphushaditsoeasy