Learning never stops. If you’re open and energetic, you can find opportunities to expand your mind with new knowledge every single day. Oh, and we mean that very literally. Every. Single. Day. It’s something that the members of the massively popular ‘Today I Learned’ online community know perfectly well.
They share the new things about history, science, and the world that they’ve learned that day, and the facts are eye-opening, to say the least. We’ve collected some of their freshest new insights to share with you, dear Pandas. Scroll down and check them out. Don't forget your thinking caps!
We got in touch with Lisa McLendon, Ph.D., with a few questions about how the news is changing as our attention spans are getting shorter, as well as what can help motivate journalists to dig deeper and stay curious as they're covering stories. McLendon is the William Allen White Professor of Journalism and Mass Communications and the Bremner Editing Center Coordinator at the University of Kansas. Read on for Bored Panda's interview with her.
#21
TIL How toxic a polar bear liver actually is. The entire liver contains enough vitamin A to kill as many as 52 adults! If you spread it out and ate just enough to get your RDA every day, that liver would last you 143 years!
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192points
Raw IQ scores aren’t as strong an indicator of future success as many believe it is, but grades and doing well on school projects might just be. For instance, economist James Heckman’s found that someone’s IQ isn’t all that tightly correlated to how well you do financially when you’re all grown up. What’s far more important is your personality. Traits like diligence, perseverance, self-discipline, and conscientiousness are far more important than how smart you (think you) are.
You don’t get good grades just by having a high IQ score. You do so by having good study habits and being able to collaborate well with other students. In short, intelligence in the broad sense encompasses non-cognitive skills and traits which are far superior to scoring high on IQ tests. At least, as far as real-life success goes.
#22
TIL movie theater sound quality was greatly improved thanks to Star Wars. Sound across movie theaters was generally inconsistent or low quality, George Lucas then co-created THX to fully project the audio quality of Return of the Jedi.
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191points
#23
TIL The country of Kenya gets nearly one half of all it’s electricity from geothermal power plants.
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188points
#24
TIL in 1985, drug smugglers dropped 40 containers of cocaine from a plane above Tennessee because the plane was too heavy. 3 months later, investigators found the containers and a dead black bear that had consumed 75 pounds of the drug. It’s stomach was “literally packed to the brim with cocaine.”
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188points
#25
TIL that in the Vietnam war the US conducted a psychological warfare operation which used loudspeakers to play eerie sounds and altered voices to represent the spirits of dead N. Vietnamese soldiers so as to undermine their morale. Operation Wandering Soul.
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178points
#26
TIL that an audio recording of a lock being opened provides enough data to reproduce the key required to open that lock, even with a cell phone's microphone.
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174points
#27
TIL that when bears hibernate, they "hold it in" for almost half a year. This is due to a fecal plug that forms in their lower intestine that prevents them from pooping while hibernating.
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173points
#28
TIL In 1998 part of the hull of the Titanic was recovered and is displayed in a casino. Visitors are given a 'boarding pass' with the name of a passenger and find out the fate of their passenger at the end of the exhibition.
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171points
#29
TIL that after Ayrton Senna's fatal crash, an Austrian flag was found in his race car. He had intended to raise it in honor of Roland Ratzenberger, who had died during qualification the previous day.
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169points
#30
TIL that the number of abs you have is genetic and varies from person to person. The number of abs you have depends on the number of rings of abdominal tissue that someone is born with, and some people can actually have 10-pack abs.
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160points