25 “Today I Learned” Facts That Prove We’ve Still Got A Lot To Discover
Some of us are just born to voraciously consume knowledge. We were raised on encyclopedias and Trivial Pursuit, and our need for fun facts never seems to diminish. If you feel the demand of that insatiable appetite for useless information, then this list may suffice to temporarily sate you.
Our team recently scoured the ‘Today I Learned’ community to find their latest additions, and our efforts have proved fruitful. We’ve rounded up the most exciting bits and pieces of proven data that our brains loved to feed on. Fresh, informative and totally random, these stats are here to live rent-free in your head because you never know when you’ll need them.
#1
TIL in 2012, two elementary school students in the state of Washington were severely sunburned on field day and brought to the hospital by their mom after they were not allowed to apply sunscreen due to not having a doctor’s note. The school district’s sunscreen policy was based on statewide law.
#2
TIL a man who developed ‘popcorn lung’ after years of inhaling the smell of artificial butter flavoring from daily consumption of microwave popcorn sued Gilster-Mary Lee Corp. and King Soopers for failing to warn on labels that the flavoring diacetyl was dangerous. In 2012, he was awarded $7,217,961
#3
TIL that during WWII, the French carmaker Citroen was forced to make vehicles for German forces. The president of Citroen, Pierre-Jules Boulanger, first sabotaged this by slowing workers. He then redesigned the dipstick to show there was plenty of oil, leading to frequent breakdowns.
#4
TIL 17-year-old female pitcher Jackie Mitchell struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in succession during an exhibition match. As a consequence, the baseball commisioner terminated her contract and Ruth later trash talked about women in baseball to a newspaper.
#5
TIL the last living veteran of the 1853 Crimean War died in 2004: Timothy, a Greek tortoise captured from a Portuguese ship, served as a mascot throughout the war
#6
TIL that people who experience “vicarioius embarassment” (feeling embarrased just observing someone else in an embarassing situation) have the same physical reactions in their nervous system as if they are the subject of the embarassing situation
#7
TIL In 1945 the adult literacy rate in South Korea was estimated at 22%. In 1970, adult literacy was 87.6%. By the late 1980s, sources estimated it at around 93%.
#8
TIL Barefoot Doctors in China were farmers, folk healers, or young grads who received minimal medical training and brought healthcare, hygiene, and family planning to rural villages where urban-trained doctors wouldn’t go. They greatly reduced infectious disease and infant mortality in rural China.
#9
TIL a Canadian engineer once built a Mjölnir replica that only the “worthy” could lift: it sensed the iron ring commonly worn by Canadian engineers (presented in a ceremony called the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer), triggering an electromagnetic release so ring-wearers could pick it up.
#10
TIL in 2008 Hugh Laurie made a single, off-hand comment claiming that a perk of being a celebrity was having a special lifetime, unlimited Burger King Crown Card (enabling him to eat there for free). He actually didn’t have one, but after his comment caused a huge public response, BK gave him one.
#11
TIL that after a rural Ohio county reported nearly 70 cases of leukemia in the mid 90s, it was discovered that a local high school had been built on an Army depot used as a dump for chemical waste.
#12
TIL the UK passport office declined to issue a 6-yr-old British girl a passport because the child’s name Khaleesi was under WB trademark. After the story was reported on & it was determined that a birth name cannot be trademarked & that trademarks are for goods & services, the decision was reversed.
#13
TIL Wes Anderson uses a flat-fee salary system in which the actors that appear in his films are all paid the same rate. He began this practice on Rushmore after Bill Murray offered to take the same pay as the then-unknown 18-year-old Jason Schwartzman as long as he could leave for a golf tournament.
#14
TIL that UPS founder James E. Casey wanted yellow vehicles, but a partner said they’d be hard to keep clean. They chose Pullman Brown instead – a colour that hides dirt, mud, and grime, and is still used on UPS trucks today.
#15
TIL in 2014 a 27-year-old man fell asleep in a hammock while camping in Kentucky. In the morning, his friends saw him get up & sleepwalk off a 60-foot cliff. However, a rhododendron bush actually broke his fall, therefore he had no life-threatening injuries. He didn’t even know he was a sleepwalker.
#16
TIL of Les Horribles Cernettes. A parody pop group made up of CERN employees, they performed primarily at events for physicists. In 1992 a colleague asked for a photo to upload to his invention “the World Wide Web”. They scanned a photo for him, and it was the first photo uploaded to the internet.
#17
TIL there is 14-thousand-year-old rock art in the middle of the Sahara desert. The paintings show crocodiles, giraffes, and hippos, from a time when the Sahara was lush grassland and forest, and was able to support these animals.
#18
TIL there was no film copyright law in Turkey until 1986, leading to films like “3 Giant Men” which featured Captain America and Mexican wrestler El Santo fighting against a chain-smoking Spider-Man villain, all to the ripped soundtracks of the James Bond movies.
#19
TIL the lost city of Petra was rediscovered by a Swiss explorer who took it upon himself to learn perfect Arabic, local customs, and gained the trust of the Bedouins to learn the location of the gorge leading to the city.
#20
TIL in 2017 Japan arrested a 74 year old man who had committed over 250 burglaries dressed as a ninja. He avoided most surveillance, but was seen “navigating tight spaces and running on walls”
#21
TIL that Rabies can make wild animals behave in a way that seems tame, friendly or even affectionate towards humans. Animals with Rabies don’t always seem rabid.
#22
TIL there are dogs specifically trained to sniff out USB drives and other electric storage medium, most notably in the arrest of Jared Fogle (guy from Subway) for CP
#23
TIL Beethoven’s late quartets, now widely considered to be among the greatest musical compositions of all time, were so ahead of their time that initial reviews deem them indecipherable, uncorrected horrors, with one musician saying “we know there is something there, but we do not know what it is.”
#24
TIL that George Carlin was a court-martialed Air Force Vet, Grammy-winning comedian, children’s TV actor, and the 1st host of SNL. His arrest for performing the routine “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” placed him at the center of a landmark Supreme Court case, FCC v. Pacifica Foundation
#25
TIL that in 2022, 90% of complaints about Dublin Airport were from one person, who made over 23,000 complaints in one year.
Shanilou Perera
Shanilou has always loved reading and learning about the world we live in. While she enjoys fictional books and stories just as much, since childhood she was especially fascinated by encyclopaedias and strangely enough, self-help books. As a kid, she spent most of her time consuming as much knowledge as she could get her hands on and could always be found at the library. Now, she still enjoys finding out about all the amazing things that surround us in our day-to-day lives and is blessed to be able to write about them to share with the whole world as a profession.
