40 Interesting Facts For Your Daily Dose Of New Knowledge (New Facts)

Let's go through some of the most interesting TIL facts, shall we? And let's start with a fun fact about vehicle inspection in the U.S. Apparently, only 10 states have mandatory vehicle inspections. That's Alaska, Arkansas, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and South Carolina.

As of 2025, Texas said "goodbye" to annual safety inspections as well. This applies to non-commercial drivers only, and the logic is that it's the owner's responsibility to ensure that the car is safe to drive. However, in some counties, folks will still have to pass emissions inspections if they have a gasoline-powered vehicle.

Another interesting fact about the family who couldn't sleep comes from Redditor u/Potatoe_expert. Science writer and author of the book about said family The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery D.T. Max told NPR they suffered from fatal familial insomnia. Currently, there are about 200 families in the world that have this disease, he says.

Other sources guess that around 50-70 families in the world carry the gene for fatal familial insomnia. This genetic condition is, unfortunately, incurable, and treatment can only slow down its progression. What makes it fatal is the damage to the brain and the nervous system from lack of sleep. Their brains can't recharge and, therefore, can't function normally.

You'd probably think that two siblings would get the same ancestry results, but Mother Nature has some tricks up her sleeve. We inherit half of our DNA from our father and the other half from our mother. Unless we're identical twins, we won't have identical DNA. In fact, siblings can share as little as 37% or as much as 65% of their genetic variants.

When in 2019, the creators of South Park aired an episode titled "Band In China," the whole show was banned in the country. The episode criticized the way US media accommodates Chinese censorship laws, with one character saying: "It's not worth living in a world where China controls my country's art." The apology from the creators only angered the country further, as they likened Xi Jinping to Winnie The Pooh and wrote: "We too love money more than freedom and democracy."

This fun fact should be really interesting for Trekkies. The creator of Star Trek: The Next Generation Gene Roddenberry didn't want to cast Patrick Stewart as the iconic Jean-Luc Picard. He wanted Picard to be "a handsome adventurer," similar to William Shatner's Captain Kirk, eyeing the actor Patrick Bachau for the role. Today, we probably couldn't imagine anyone else as Picard, so, kudos to Sir Patrick Stewart!

As a person who knows next to nothing about baseball, I was quite impressed to learn that the ball is thrown at such a speed that the eye can't track it. The fastest MLB pitcher in history is Aroldis Chapman. His pitch was recorded at 105.8 mph (that's 170 km/h!) in 2010. Ben Joyce was the fastest pitcher in 2024 when he threw a 105.5 mph strikeout and currently enjoys third place after Chapman.