If you've been visiting Reddit for a while, you know a single click in the wrong direction can lead you to a terrible place. But communities like braincels aside, the site has been offering awesome content too.
Take the subreddit Today I Learned (TIL) for example. It's a place where users submit surprising yet totally legit facts to broaden each other's knowledge of the world.
Whether it's the everyday life of former presidents or the recreational use of x-rays in the 1890s, these guys constantly unearth something interesting.
#1

TIL in the anatomy building at Dalian Medical University, where medical student can practice on cadavers, there's a sign with a quote from a donor that reads "I’d rather let students try something 20 times on me than see them make one mistake on a future patient.”
Report
286points
#2

TIL that Muhammad Ali went to Iraq in 1990 against the then president George H.W. Bush's wishes and secured the release of 15 american citizen hostages held in Iraqi prisons, and brought them home.
Report
252points
#3

TIL 30 years ago a tank crushed a small red car in Osijek, Croatia, as a show of force. In 2011 a monument was built: a tiny red car, crushing a tank.
Report
251points
#4

TIL Graça Machel was married to the President of Mozambique until he died in a plane crash, she later married Nelson Mandela while he was President of South Africa. She is the only person in modern history to be First Lady of two different countries.
Report
234points
#5

TIL that some hikers and researchers have spotted wild birds swearing. It is belived that birds that escaped from captivity teach other wild birds how to speak and swear in English.
Report
216points
#6

TIL a defibrillator doesn't restart a stopped heart. In fact quite the opposite, it actually stops a heart in the middle of a cardiac event, allowing the heart’s natural back-up system to take over and return it to normal sinus rhythm.
Report
209points
#7

TIL Goku from DBZ in Japan is voiced by an 84 year old woman, who holds world records for her long-running voice acting career
Report
205points
#8

TIL a legend goes that during the Thirty Years' War, a Catholic army wanted to destroy Rothenburg ob der Tauber in Germany for resisting the Count of Tilly. Tilly declared that if anyone could drink a 3.25 L drink of wine in one go, he would spare the town. The local mayor saved the town that day.
Report
198points
#9

TIL in 2018, an electrical engineer on board the Bellingshausen Research station in Antartica stabbed a fellow coworker in the chest multiple times because the colleague had been giving away the endings of books available in the research station’s library.
Report
185points
#10

TIL when the UN's Nordic Battalion was sent to Bosnia in 1993 it disobeyed orders, broke rules of engagement, faked loss of communication to HQ, and became known as one the most trigger-happy peacekeeper units. This enabled them to achieve their mission objective: to protect civilians at all cost.
Report
179points
#11

TIL that FDR's White House served notoriously terrible meals. First Lady Eleanor wanted to set an example for the country during the Depression by serving economical meals made from scraps
Report
168points
#12

TIL the first Soviet citizen to visit the White House was a female WWII sniper with 309 confirmed kills, one of which was a sniper she dueled for 3 days.
Report
163points
#13

TIL British banknotes increase in size as they increase in value to help blind people tell them apart
Report
158points
#14

TIL as a prank, a man once climbed Mount Hood in the middle of the night and surreptitiously left a morning newspaper and a quart of milk for his friends, who were spending the night on the summit
Report
157points
#15

TIL that energy consumption in the UK is around the same as the 1970s, due to more efficient appliances and domestic solar technology
Report
157points
#16

TIL that in 1524, a statue of the Virgin Mary at the Cathedral in Riga, Latvia, was accused of being a witch. They put it on trial by throwing it in the river. Since the wooden statue floated, they declared it guilty and burned it.
Report
150points
#17

TIL Denmark received a week's notice to get a team ready for Euro Cup in 1992, to replace Yugoslavia as it was disqualified due to the Yugoslav Wars. Less than a month later, the underdogs were champions.
Report
144points
#18

TIL in 1948, Milwaukee burger chain George Webb’s said they would give free hamburgers if the local baseball team won 12 games in a row. Since then it’s only happened twice: in 1987, and 2018. They honored the promise and gave out hundreds of thousands of free burgers.
Report
141points
#19

TIL that in 1929, determined to prove his hypothesis, Werner Frossman tricked a nurse, inserted a catheter through his own arm, and walked with the inserted tube to an x-ray lab to photograph his discovery, thereby inventing cardiac catheterization and winning a Nobel Prize for it later.
Report
140points
#20

TIL The Brothers Grimm, being from a lower class, were excluded from university admission & tuition aid due to being poor. But upon publishing their 1st volume of 86 folk tales, they received honorary doctorate degrees from universities in Berlin, Marburg, & Wrocław.
Report
133points


