We learn something new every day. Sometimes completely by chance. For example, did you know that French newborns cry with a rising melody, while German newborns cry with a falling melody? Or that people living within one mile of a golf course have a 126% higher risk of a Parkinson's Disease diagnosis than those living further away?
If you're looking for some new gems to add to your wealth of knowledge, you might want to join a community of like-minded individuals over at the Today I Learned page. More than 5.2 million people pop in every week to devour and share fascinating and fun facts. Every now and again, Bored Panda compiles a list of the page's best posts and we're giving you another round right now...
#41
TIL that newborns can distinguish the sounds of every language on Earth, about 600 consonants and 200 vowels, but by their first birthday, their brain has already filtered out sounds not used in their native language, making foreign accents almost inevitable for adult learners.
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30points
#42
TIL since the age of five, 77 year old Martha Lillard is the only remaining patient to still live in an iron lung
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28points
#43
TIL about firefighter Donald Herbert. After lapsing into a coma following a firefighting accident he awoke a year later unable to recognize friends or family. He then lapsed into a minimally conscious state for over 9 years. Miraculously, he awoke again and his first question was about his wife.
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28points
#44
TIL a couple walking their dog found 1,427 buried gold coins valued at about $10 million, the largest known buried gold-coin discovery ever recovered in the United States.
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25points
#45
TIL Margot Robbie convinced Martin Scorsese to cast her in The Wolf of Wall Street by hauling off & giving Leonardo DiCaprio an improvised "thunderclap of a slap on the face" during her first audition that stunned DiCaprio & Scorsese. Both men burst out laughing afterwards and thought it was great.
24points
#46
TIL a supermarket suddenly closed in 1999 and the owners walked away, leaving everything behind. Perishable foods rotted for months in the Texas summer heat, causing a foul stench and leading the building to be declared a biohazard. A hazmat team took 2 weeks to clean the store.
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24points
#47
TIL that First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln was institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital by her only surviving son. She snuck letters out to her lawyers and sympathizers who helped get her released three months later.
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24points
#48
TIL in 2008 a 33-year-old Wisconsin woman stole her daughter's identity and enrolled in high school in order to "get her high school diploma and join the cheerleading squad." She reportedly attended practices, received a cheerleader's locker & went to a pool party at the cheerleading coach's house.
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24points
#49
TIL about two-thirds of all scurvy is found in autistic people
24points
#51
TIL when Eminem's weight increased to 230lbs (100 kg) before he became sober, he was so unrecognizable due to the weight gain that Em once overheard two teenagers arguing about whether or not it was actually him that they were looking at, with one of them stating "Eminem ain't fat."
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23points
#52
TIL when Guinness World Records stopped monitoring the record for the most beer drunk in one hour in 1989, the record holder at the time was 23-year-old Jack Keyes who drank 36 pints over the course of one hour in Northern Ireland in 1969.
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21points
#53
TIL that Empress Ma was born poor and during a famine she stole cakes to feed her husband by hiding them in her breasts. The cakes were hot and she got burns. Later her husband became a rebel commander who became Emperor and made her his Empress. He was deeply devoted to her even as an Emperor.
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20points
#54
TIL that Maria Antonia of Austria had the highest inbreeding coefficient (0.3053) of the House of Habsburg - higher than the child of brother and sister or the child of a parent and their own offspring
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20points
#55
TIL David Fincher let Meat Loaf shadow him during the directing process for Fight Club (1999). Meat Loaf "hardly spent any time" in his trailer because he instead would sit behind Fincher so he could see what Fincher saw. Meat Loaf even helped Fincher select which take to use for some scenes.
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20points
#56
TIL Coca Cola once made “MagiCans” that secretly contained cash prizes instead of soda. To stop people from spotting winners by weight, they filled part of the cans with foul-smelling chlorinated liquid. The promotion got canceled after people accidentally drank it. The promotion lasted for 3 weeks.
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20points
#57
TIL warm-blooded mammals are naturally resistant to most fungal infections because their body heat creates a “thermal barrier” that fungi can’t survive, which suggests this evolved as protection against poisonous fungi
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20points
#58
TIL the cockpit voice recording of Delta Flight 1141 was so embarrassing it led to a law restricting the public release of CVRs. The crew discussed drink mixes & dating habits during takeoff procedure, with a pilot joking that in case they crashed, "the media would have some kind of juicy tidbit".
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20points
#59
TIL The "Great Male Renunciation" was a period in fashion in the late 18th century where men in the West ceased wearing bright colors, jewelry, and varied garments in favor of utilitarian clothes and black suits
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19points
#60
TIL that when France initially set the definition of a metre to be 1/10,000,000 the distance from the North Pole to the equator, it sent two surveyors to calculate the distance. But due to an error not discovered until decades later, the resulting metre was actually 0.2 mm too short.
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18points