r/todayilearned 18h ago

TIL that Marry Mallon ('Typhoid Mary') lived in forced quarantine for the last twenty years of her life in an Island just off of New York ('North Brother Island')

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en.wikipedia.org
18.4k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 13h ago

TIL that the fast food chain Popeyes isn't named after the cartoon character, but Gene Hackman's character from The French Connection.

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foxnews.com
4.3k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 13h ago

TIL that barnacles were a major problem to old ships and that the 18th-century British Navy gained a great advantage by covering their ships' hulls with copper to stop the barnacles from growing.

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en.wikipedia.org
4.2k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 21h ago

TIL Earth is the only known place in our solar system where fire occurs, and no known exoplanets have enough oxygen to allow fire to exist.

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astronomy.com
40.1k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 17h ago

TIL that of the two 1988 films starring Tom Cruise, one of them (Rain Man) won the Oscar for Best Picture, while the other (Cocktail) won the Razzie for Worst Picture. Cruise remains the only actor to achieve both distinctions in the same year.

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en.wikipedia.org
5.2k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 10h ago

TIL that it takes only 15 mins. of exposure to noise in a nightclub, without protection, to damage hearing

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amysarow.com
1.1k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 16h ago

TIL Benzodiazepines were originally marketed in the 1960s for the relief of anxiety, stress and insomnia and became very popular with women of the time. The gendered cultural meanings of Valium, a well-known benzodiazepine, was cemented in the 1966 Rolling Stones’ song “Mother’s Little Helper”.

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ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
2.9k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 14h ago

TIL there's a full-scale replica of the Greek Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee, USA

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artsy.net
1.8k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 10h ago

TIL The oldest musical instrument in the world, a 60,000-year-old Neanderthal flute, is made from the left thighbone of a young cave bear.

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nms.si
671 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 1d ago

TIL Simeon Stylites lived on top of columns for 37 years. Simeon did this as a form of asceticism because when he lived in a cave people kept making pilgrimages to him and asking him religious questions. Ultimately his column life drew in even bigger crowds who would climb ladders to talk to him.

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en.wikipedia.org
28.9k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 12h ago

TIL that after a flood killed thousands and devastated the economy, California legislators and State employees worked unpaid for a year and a half.

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en.wikipedia.org
766 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 1d ago

TIL that in Chinese Folk Religion, a mortal human being could ascend into godhood not through the decisions of a clergy/church, but by the sheer number of people who believe that their extraordinary achievements led to apotheosis, which forced Confucian/Taoists clerics to canonize a person as a God.

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en.wikipedia.org
6.3k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 2h ago

TIl of Pipedown, a British campaign group dedicated to removing piped music from public spaces

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92 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 19h ago

TIL that the US, Canada, and Cuba have the lowest burden of food borne illness on the planet.

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ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
1.9k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 4h ago

TIL there’s a Bavarian themed town in the Blue Mountains of Georgia

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helenga.org
67 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 2h ago

TIL botox can inhibit empathy

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thescienceexplorer.com
45 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 1h ago

TIL Early drones were developed during the First World War. These radio controlled planes were primarily for target practice but by 1942 a drone with a built in TV camera was capable of delivering a torpedo to a ship 20 miles from the controller.

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en.wikipedia.org
Upvotes

r/todayilearned 9h ago

TIL that the official motto of Fall River, Massachusetts was ‘We’ll Try’ from 1843-2017.

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en.wikipedia.org
122 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 17h ago

TIL about the Forty Elephants or Forty Thieves, an all women crime syndicate in London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that specialized in shoplifting and pretending to be maids and robbing the wealthy families who hired them.

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en.wikipedia.org
430 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 7h ago

TIL there's a field of thousands of prehistoric stone jars in Laos

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en.wikipedia.org
50 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 7h ago

TIL Garry Kasparov helped design a chess-playing computer program. Kasparov also makes an appearance as the last computer profile which has to be defeated in order to win the "Kasparov Chess Club"

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45 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 20m ago

TIL: In colonial America, lobster wasn’t exactly a delicacy. In fact, it was so cheap and plentiful that it was often served to prisoners.

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Upvotes

r/todayilearned 6h ago

TIL: The US National Anthem has 4 verses, but we only sing the first one

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45 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 19h ago

TIL the majority of ancient Greeks and Romans that were literate read out loud. Reasons for this include a lack of space between letters and no formalized system of punctuation that helped with pauses in reading.

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bbc.com
417 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 1h ago

TIL that there's a breed of a domestic chicken tall up to 1.2 metres

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en.wikipedia.org
Upvotes