30 Interesting Things People Didn’t Learn At School And Decided To Share Them In This Online Group (New Pics)
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.
If you're done scrolling and the list leaves you thirsty for more trivia, check out Bored Panda's earlier pieces on Today I Learned here, here, and here.
This post may include affiliate links.
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.”
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.
This just shows that Iraq saw an opportunity to embarrass a US president and went for it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The clue (if you're into medical terminology) is in the name. When the heart goes into ventricular fibrillation (the fib part of defib) it's wobbling like a jelly and not able to beat or contract properly to pump the blood. A defib interrupts the wobble signal. (Yes, I've mixed medical terminology with the layman's version - ventricular wobbles! - but sometimes it helps)
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
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.
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.
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.
It was a Swedish battalion, lead by Senior Colonel Henriksson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulf_Henricsson
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
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.
TIL British banknotes increase in size as they increase in value to help blind people tell them apart
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
TIL that energy consumption in the UK is around the same as the 1970s, due to more efficient appliances and domestic solar technology
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
TIL It is quite common for older homes to have piles of razor blades in their walls.
TIL about Acclimatisation Societies. Groups of people from the 19th century that would purposely introduce exotic species to new places. They are responsible for massive ecological disasters.
The worse part is some scientists still do this to this day. A notable one were some american scientists who inserted beavers in the chilean patagonia a while ago... The beavers messed up the ecosystem, and it's still ruined to this day, with no consequences for the bright minds who thought that would be a good idea.
Or the bright spark who shipped cane toads to Australia to solve the cane beetles... didn't eat a single beetle, but ruining ecologies wherever they go and still spreading with no idea how to stop them
Load More Replies...And not only animals, this was a human disaster too. Exotic species of HUMANS were also on display. In the Parisian Jardin d 'acclimatation, more than 35 human displays between 1877 and 1937, and they were common in a lot of acclimatisation zoos all across Europe. Kanaks, Africans, Indians...they were presented as exotic wild species. Inhabitants of the Land of Fire (south Chile and Argentina) on display in 1889. aclimatati...6f0168.jpg
A group of 100 starlings was released in New York in 1890. They now number almost 200 million and are the most abundant bird in the country. They complete with native species and destroy crops. I just wish the folks that thought it was such a great idea back then could see what they’ve done.
And 2 centuries later, people are still talking about terraforming Mars by introducing Earth microbes and plants.
I'd like to personally thank (with a club) whoever introduced Chinese bittersweet to New England. The only way to get rid of it is to cut the vine, then dab the cut end with a serious herbicide like Roundup. (Other than this, I don't use herbicides at all on my property. But the bittersweet would take over, winding its insidious vines around native trees and plants and killing them.)
Uuugh that's so horrible. We've got Canadian goose in Germany which are obviously not native. They hav no natural enemies here and reproduce a lot. They are aggressive when they have young ones and pollute parks literally with their sh*t. Worse than dog poo in some places and that is bad enough.
A lot of people just can't leave well enough alone. They think they know best.
Probably to hunt. I can think of one famous family who lived at the Biltmore.
Meh, just introduce everything to everywhere. It'll balance itself out... :)
You're not wrong. On the long run, things will balance out. We will lose some species forever, but nature itself will just find substitutes. I am, of course, against your idea, but you''re not wron about it. Species in island-nations like Polynesia and Madagascar and New Zealand etc will be lost forever because there's hardly any protection against predators as adept as cats and canines.
Load More Replies...TIL Disney's Fireworks use pneumatic launch technology, developed for Disneyland as required by CA's South Coast AQMD. This uses compressed air instead of gunpowder to launch shells into the air. This eliminates the trail of the igniting firework and permits tight control over height and timing.
TIL capybaras, the largest extant rodent, have adapted well to urbanization in South America, and they can be found in many urban parks and lakes. Capybaras are quite docile and often allow humans to pet them though it is discouraged as the mammals' ticks can carry the Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
TIL nearly all French wine grapes are grown on vines grafted to root stock from Missouri. in the 1860s, phylloxera bugs threatened to destroy the vineyards, but roots from the US were resistant. Hundreds of thousands were shipped in and used to save the French vines.
TIL about the Tarantula Hawk, which has a sting that causes "...immediate, excruciating, unrelenting pain that simply shuts down one's ability to do anything, except scream."
TIL that in 1923, a man petitioned to change his surname from Kabotchnik to Cabot. Several members of the Cabot family, one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Boston society, sued to stop him, but the judge ruled against them because there was “nothing in the law to prevent it.”
There is a Cabot family in Fallout 4 which takes place in Boston. I now know where they came up with the idea for that family.
TIL of "Janet" Airlines, a secret, full-service airline that carries military and contractor employees to sites such as Area 51.
TIL that when a plane was hijacked over Switzerland in 2014, the neighboring countries of Italy and France had to send their own fighter jets to the scene because the incident happened outside of the Swiss Air Force's business hours, and even hijackings weren't important enough to pay for overtime.
til thag there we two men who wanted to get married but it was illegal at the time to get a marriage liscwnse for gay people, so one of them changed his name to pat, cause it's a unisex name. they for their marriage liscwnse.
til thag there we two men who wanted to get married but it was illegal at the time to get a marriage liscwnse for gay people, so one of them changed his name to pat, cause it's a unisex name. they for their marriage liscwnse.