If an apple a day keeps the doctor away, does learning new facts each day keep boredom at bay?
Alright, I promise I’m not writing a Doctor Seuss-esque story here. But if you’re interested in learning something new, you’ve come to the right place! We’ve got a brand new list of facts from the “Today I Learned” subreddit that will give you something fascinating to talk about at your next dinner party.
Be sure to upvote the facts that you learned from this article, and feel free to share anything else you’ve recently found out in the comments below. We’re never too old to learn something new, so if you’re interested in continuing your education after finishing this article, you can find some of Bored Panda’s previous “Today I Learned” pieces here, here and here!
#1
TIL the pet food company Chewy sends flowers and a card when a customer’s pet dies. They will reimburse the purchase of unopened food and suggest it be donated to a shelter. They also offer the option of talking to someone about the grief of losing a pet.
Image source: marmorset
#2
TIL that Steve McQueen had a habit of demanding free items, in bulk, from studios, when doing movies, it was later discovered that these items (like electric razors and jeans) went to Boys Republic reformatory school, where McQueen had been, as a teenager.
Image source: Ryan_Holman, wikimedia.commons
#3
TIL since its premiere in 1987 the show Unsolved Mysteries has helped locate half of the wanted fugitives it has featured, reunited over 100 lost loves and freed 7 prisoners who were wrongfully convicted. An additional 260+ cases involving murder, missing persons and fraud have also been solved.
Image source: GoodSamaritan_
#4
TIL Oscar the Therapy Cat accurately predicted 25 deaths. After this the staff started notifying family members of residents to come say goodbye if Oscar was curled up next to them.
Image source: Excivious, Erik-Jan Leusink
#5
TIL some insomniacs may have nights of “sleep misperception”, where it feels like you were awake all night but you actually slept for hours.
Image source: xxdoomkitty, Lux Graves
#6
TIL In 36BCE, Roman statesman Marcus Varro wrote about germs, describing “minute creatures which cannot be seen by the eyes, which enter the body through the mouth & nose & there cause serious diseases”. The germ theory of disease would not be widely accepted for another 1,900 years.
Image source: nerdy_subha, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Publich Health Image Library
#7
TIL Sugar does not cause hyperactivity in children. This myth is based on a single 1978 study; no subsequent study has shown a relationship.
Image source: rirold, Mathilde Langevin
#8
TIL During the 2000’s, Google, Apple, Adobe, Intel, and several other mega corporations had a mutual agreement not to hire each other’s employees in order to keep salaries low. This led to a 400 mil class action lawsuit.
Image source: knight54, Khwanchai Phanthong
#9
TIL Teddy roosevelt, who is thought of as the national park man, is actually the National forest man. During his presidency he founded 5 of 63 US national parks. As for national forests, he founded 150 of the 154 US national forests!
Image source: NationalParkFan_, SMU Central University Libraries
#10
TIL that Ben & Jerry’s employees are entitled to 3 free pints of ice cream every day.
Image source: Lagavulin16_neat, Cristi Ursea
#11
TIL David Copperfield was once robbed at gunpoint — but successfully performed an illusion to convince the robbers his pockets were empty when they weren’t.
Image source: MississippiJoel, wikimedia.commons
#12
TIL traffic roundabouts, compared to intersections with stop signs or signals, have 37% fewer overall collisions, 75% fewer injury collisions, and 90% fewer fatal collisions.
Image source: PianoCharged, Una Smith
#13
TIL in 1912 4 yr-old Bobby Dunbar disappeared, was found eight months later in Mississippi with a couple that refuted that it was him. Courts ordered the boy to live with the Dunbars. 100 years later DNA verified that the boy was Bruce Anderson and had been wrongly identified by Dunbar’s parents.
Image source: Bdub76
#14
TIL NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar agreed to appear in the movie “Airplane!” on the condition he be paid $35,000.. the exact price of a rug he wanted to purchase.
Image source: TonyT074
#15
TIL about Giles Corey, who was accused of witchcraft during the Salem trials. He used a legal loophole and refused to plea, which meant he couldn’t be tried. He was then tortured to death, but still refused to plea, allowing his children to claim their inheritance.
Image source: TheAnswerToYang
#16
TIL that the geologist Michel Siffre spent 2 months underground without time cues to study how his body clock adapted, repeated the experiment for even longer on himself and more subjects, and discovered that their bodies tended to switch to a 48-hour clock. In one case, one even slept 34 hours.
Image source: ShabtaiBenOron
#17
TIL Marjoe Gortner is an Evangelical preacher who decided to pull the curtain back on the scams he and other preachers used. He invited a crew to film behind the scenes as he revealed tricks of the trade and the sacks full of cash he earned nightly. It won the ’72 Academy Award Best Documentary.
Image source: Bluest_waters
#18
TIL certain species of wild oats are able to walk. They have a pair of ‘legs’ called awns which flex and make the seeds crawl around, to find an ideal place to plant itself.
Image source: Azmaeth, Markus Spiske
#19
TIL in an effort to protect her son and daughter from falling under the sinister charms of Charles Manson, Angela Lansbury relocated her family from LA to Ireland. Describing Ireland as “free from bad influences”, she then refused work to better support their recovery from heroin addiction.
Image source: Unlucky-Pomegranate3, wikimedia.commons
#20
TIL Abraham Lincoln signed the bill creating the Secret Service on April 14, 1865, the day he was assassinated.
Image source: Avalon336, wikimedia.commons
#21
TIL about bank robber and kidnapper Vassilis Palaiokostas who is known as the “Greek Robin Hood” for giving away most of his stolen millions to the poor. He escaped by helicopter from the same maximum security prison twice while serving a 25 year sentence and remains at large despite a €1m bounty.
Image source: GoodSamaritan_, Bundesarchiv
#22
TIL the car coordinator of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood managed to locate the exact 1959 Ford driven by the Manson Family, but a replica was used instead because the idea of having the real Manson car was considered too creepy.
Image source: beansandrice96
#23
TIL Wheat and Barley were ancient Egyptian pregnancy tests. A woman would urinate on bags of barley and wheat and if they sprouted, she was likely pregnant. A 1963 study found that this was accurate ~70% of the time.
Image source: aspersnickety
#24
TIL that Pope Innocent VIII was breastfed while he was on his deathbed, as that was the only thing he could eat or drink.
Image source: TheGeminiWolf
#25
TIL the vocals for the Gnarls Barley song “Crazy” (2006) were recorded in one take. Not only that, it was the first time singer CeeLo Green ever tried singing the lyrics. The song topped the charts in many countries and peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100.
Image source: big_macaroons
#26
TIL Boeing built an entire fake town on top of their Seattle area factory during WW2.
Image source: sniperx1010, Seattle Times archive
#27
TIL TGI Fridays stopped requiring employees to wear flair after Office Space came out and customers began making jokes about the flair.
Image source: DavidAssBednar
#28
TIL that US Navy sailor’s love of ice cream in world war II was so great that in 1943 the navy purchased an ‘ice cream barge’ to act as a mobile ice cream making factory for sailors and marines. The barge was capable of producing 10 gallons of ice cream every 7 minutes.
Image source: je97
#29
TIL that Ticketmaster was caught recruiting resellers to scalp its own tickets.
Image source: kellenbrent
#30
TIL that during the looting of the Chinese imperial palace at the end of the 2nd Opium War, the British soldiers took a Pekingese dog to gift to Queen Victoria. She named it “Looty”.
Image source: AccessTheMainframe, wikimedia.commons
#31
TIL Emperor Hirohito of Japan was given the original print of the Disney short Lambert the Sheepish Lion, after it was learned it was his favourite Disney film.
Image source: LoneRangersBand
#32
TIL World War II codebreaker Dilly Knox used to solve coded enemy messages in the bathtub and persuaded his superiors to have a bathtub installed in his office in the cryptanalysis section of the British Admiralty.
Image source: Tardigradelegs, Matt Dempsey
#33
TIL Physiologist Giles Brindley, in 1983 presented his treatment for erectile disfunction by injecting himself before his talk and dropping his pants to show the crowd of urologists.
Image source: escherlogic, Lupus in Saxonia
#34
TIL Mel Gibson originally intended for The Passion of the Christ to have no subtitles, despite the film being entirely in Latin, Hebrew and Aramaic.
Image source: Old-Association700
#35
TIL that there was a 60s band named Nirvana that tried to sue the 90s band for having the same name as them. They wanted to cover them after that, but the project was scrapped due to Kurt Cobains death.
Image source: biggestmemelover
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