'Today I Learned': 40 Interesting Things People Haven't Learned At School

TIL that in 1920, the town of Jackson, Wyoming elected an all-female town council by a margin of 2-1 over the men, drawing the most voters the town had ever seen. Known as the "pettycoat rulers," the women served for 3 years and did a great deal to clean up the notoriously lawless town.

TIL there’s a cemetery in the Netherlands consisting of 8,300 US veterans who died in WWII. For the past 70 years, Dutch families have come to the cemetery every Sunday to care for a grave they adopted. Hundreds of people are currently on a waiting list to become caretakers.

TIL that in during WW2, an American bomber -*ye olde pub*- was nearly shot down. A German fighter gave chase and once in range, he noticed the dead and injured crew and the terror in the pilots face. He didn’t attack and escorted the plane. Both pilots survived the war and finally met in 1990

TIL Prairie dog language is complex. They don’t just have a call for “danger”: their calls differentiate human, hawk, domesticated dog, coyote etc. and specify size & color. One study found that they can communicate “Here comes the short human in the yellow” (vs the tall human in blue) to each other

TIL that Bill Murray once drove a taxi cab so that the cab driver could spend time playing saxophone in the backseat. The cab driver mentioned that he never had time to play his sax since he had to work 14 hours a day. Murray took the driver’s seat so that he could finally play some tunes.

TIL of Ken Allen, a Borneo orangutan in the San Diego Zoo who escaped his enclosure three times. He never acted aggressively towards anyone during his escapes, and generally wandered around the zoo looking at other animals.

TIL the founder of Hyundai was born to an impoverished family of peasants in what is now North Korea. In 1998, he sent 1001 cows to his hometown in North Korea as a repayment 1000 times over for a cow that he stole in the early 1930s to afford his train ticket to Seoul and escape from poverty.

TIL That Aki Ra, a former Khmer Rouge child soldier has personally found and/or destroyed over 50,000 land mines. He now trains bomb experts, curates a mine museum, and advocates for demining and the victims of mines.

TIL in the 1790s, an Oxford student introduced using guano (bird poop) as fertiliser. He spread guano across the university lawn, using it to spell G U A N O. The lawn was soon scrubbed, but when spring came, the word GUANO was clearly visible, growing higher and thicker than the rest of the grass

TIL that elephants are tremendous distance swimmers. They can swim for up to six hours and 25 miles (48km). They are so buoyant that if they tire in the water, they can just rest by floating and will not sink. They can also use their trunk as a snorkel and dive.

TIL in 1980 the FBI formed a fake company and attempted to bribe members of congress. Nearly 25% of those tested accepted the bribe, and were convicted.

TIL scientists used 2,000 year old seeds to regrow an extinct species of date tree. The tree long disappeared from the Judean desert but archeologists found seeds on digs. Surprisingly, the seeds worked and grew a male and female of the species. They hope to use them to produce biblical era dates.

TIL that in the Falklands, an abandoned minefield has accidentally become a penguin sanctuary. The mines were set in the Falklands conflict and have remained there since, keeping humans away. The local Magellanic penguins are too small to set them off and have thrived in the area.

TIL The holes in honeycombs don't actually start out as hexagons. Bees create circular tubes staggered with one another. The heat formed by the activity of the bees softens the wax, which connects the gaps between the holes. Then the wax hardens into the the most energy efficient shape, the hexagon.

TIL that when Eli Wallach, who played "The Ugly" in "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly," arrived in Madrid to shoot the movie, all hotels were full. He ended up having to sleep in the same bed as Clint Eastwood and later often bragged that he was the only man who ever slept with Clint Eastwood.

TIL Not only do bats make high-pitched sounds for echolocation, many bat species also sing. A team of scientists that analyzed one species’ song translated it as a sequence that opens with a hello, then a gender identification, then some geographic information, & then a "let's talk" section.

TIL that the founder of Old Bay seafood seasoning founded his own company after being fired by McCormick after two days on the job after they found out he was Jewish