It’s worth being curious about the world because it keeps your mind healthy, and it's a ton of fun on top of that. There’s always something new to learn, and it is a humbling experience to realize just how many things we don’t know. And one of the best places on the internet to face this head-on is the ‘Today I Learned’ group that gets millions of visitors every week.
We have collected our favorite interesting and fresh facts from the TIL community that helped us expand our minds, and we hope that they’ll help you, too. Put on your thinking cap, get your brain ready, and let’s get into it.
#41
TIL six bull sharks trapped in a golf course lake near Brisbane after floods in 1996 survived there until 2013, a 17-year stay that researchers described as the longest uninterrupted period ever recorded for bull sharks in a low-salinity environment.
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17points
#42
TIL that during the 2014 World Cup, the Singaporean government aired an anti-gambling PSA where a boy complained that his father bet their life savings on Germany winning; this backfired when Germany actually won.
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16points
#43
TIL some severely neglectful orphanages were described as "silent" because infants learned that crying doesn't bring attention or comfort.
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15points
#44
TIL a Swedish pilot flew commercial airliners for 13 years for 3 airlines without a valid commercial pilot's license. He accumulated 10K hours in the air. To get hired, he used a fake license he'd created himself. He said, "It was a fantasy creation. It wasn't laminated... It was surprisingly easy."
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15points
#45
TIL The Liver is the only vital organ in the human body that can fully regenerate. Even after two-thirds of its healthy tissue has been damaged or removed. With full anatomical restoration taking only 3 months.
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15points
#46
TIL that during the 1970 World Cup qualifiers, members of the Australia national team consulted a witch doctor preceding their game against Rhodesia. Australia won but didn't pay the witch doctor, so he cursed their team instead. After that, Australia failed to qualify for the World Cup for 32 years.
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15points
#47
TIL at the current rate of erosion, approximately 30 centimeters (12 inches) per year, in about 50,000 years Niagara Falls will have eroded the remaining 32 km (20 mi) to Lake Erie, and the falls will cease to exist.
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15points
#49
TIL of "going to the people" movement, aka "the mad summer of 1874", when as many as 4000 students abandoned their studies in the city or burned their degrees and moved to the countryside, intending to adopt the life of a peasant. Most of them had no experience of what that life was like at all.
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15points
#50
TIL that alcohol use in America likely peaked during the 1830s. The average American drank 7 gallons of pure ethanol a year. Midwestern corn farmers converted their grain into whisky to prevent spoilage. A gallon cost only 25 cents. Americans averaged 4 shots of whisky a day, at under a penny cost.
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14points
#51
TIL the slang word “stan”, invented by Eminem's song of the same name, was not a deliberate portmanteau of "stalker" and "fan", but a mere ‘happy coincidence’. Eminem chose the name simply because it rhymed with the word "fan".
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14points
#52
TIL that after teaching a bonobo how to comprehend English, he started trying to speak; "it was discovered that Kanzi was producing the articulatory equivalent of the symbols he was indicating, although in a very high pitch and with distortions".
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14points
#53
TIL the playwright Eugene O’Neill disowned his 18-year-old daughter Oona over her marriage to 54-year-old Charlie Chaplin. He never saw Oona again and never met any of the eight children she had by Chaplin.
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14points
#54
TIL The Onion didn't publish their print newspaper set for release on September 11th, 2001 as well as the subsequent issue. Employees went on a week long break and some threatened to quit if an issue about the attacks were released.
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14points
#55
TIL of a couple who tried to conceive for 20 years, failing multiple IVFs and surgeries. Scientists used a new AI-guided robotic system that scanned 2.5 million microscopic images of a single sample, found the only 2 viable cells hidden inside, and successfully started a pregnancy.
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14points
#56
TIL about wet-bulb events - when it’s so hot and humid that your body can’t cool by sweating. A wet cloth on a thermometer bulb normally cools it more than one without a cloth. But when humidity is very high, the wet- and dry-bulb temperatures are the same. This can ultimately be a lethal event.
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13points
#57
TIL Steve Jobs’ design obsession went so deep he demanded Apple computers look perfect on the inside. Inspired by Zen Buddhism and Bauhaus minimalism, he believed in “deep simplicity,” and insisted that even the hidden internal engineering look as polished as the outside.
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13points
#58
TIL that the oldest known human voice recording ever made in 1860, was never heard by it's inventor. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's invention only was able to capture sound waves on paper, yet had no way to turn them back into sound. Only 148 years later was when it was first heard.
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13points
#59
TIL that Doctor Who's first ever Christmas episode "The Feast of Steven" is one of the few missing episode to be considered irretrievably lost, as the episode was never sold to overseas broadcasters, and so no copies of it were ever made before the original tape's junking.
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13points
#60
TIL about the Breakthrough Starshot project, which proposed sending gram-sized robots to the nearest star system Alpha Centauri by using a massive Earth-based laser array to accelerate tiny light sails to about 20% the speed of light. The probes could theoretically reach Alpha Centauri in 20 years.
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12points