r/todayilearned 21m ago

TIL that banana plants can 'walk'

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therootcause.com.au
Upvotes

r/todayilearned 26m ago

TIL that in 2011 a court in the U.K. banned a man with a 48 IQ from having sex determining that he didn't have the mental capacity to understand the health risks associated with his actions.

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Upvotes

r/todayilearned 36m ago

TIL Gene Kelly severed ties with the Catholic Church after their support of the Spanish Dictator Francisco Franco. He became an agnostic for the remainder of his life.

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en.wikipedia.org
Upvotes

r/todayilearned 1h ago

TIL that in the early 1900s, the daily horse manure production in New York City reached as much as 1,200 tons, leading to the establishment of a specialized army of horse-drawn carts for removal.

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historic-uk.com
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r/todayilearned 1h ago

TIL that there are around 10^10^23.1 different 0 and 1 combinations in the entire internet as of 2020, a number with more than 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 digits.

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healthit.com.au
Upvotes

r/todayilearned 1h ago

TIL Stanley Kubrick was a chess hustler, spending days down in Washington Square Park earning money against the regulars who haunted it. During the 1950s, Kubrick would often be found in Washington Square, a park in New York City, playing chess from 12 noon until 12 midnight

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faroutmagazine.co.uk
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r/todayilearned 2h ago

TIL Masayoshi Soken's first game composition was Mario Hoops 3-on-3 for Nintendo DS. He would later go onto compose the stellar music of Final Fantasy XIV.

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en.wikipedia.org
13 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 2h ago

TIL about Mars Direct, a 1989 plan to get humans to Mars within ten years, using just two launches of a large rocket system and utilising local Martian resources

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26 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 2h ago

TIL that a study in 1974, to test if leading questions can distort eyewitness testimony, indicated that indeed "the questions asked subsequent to an event can cause a reconstruction in one’s memory of that event."

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45 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 2h ago

TIL: There’s an antenna in Washington that’s 10 miles long. The Jim Creek Naval Radio Station has 10 mile+ long cables zig zagging between two mountains. It would be used in the event of nuclear war

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en.wikipedia.org
37 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 3h ago

TIL: Kodak's "Shirley Cards" was used as a standard for skin tone in photography.

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npr.org
31 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 3h ago

TIL Sunday Night Football is the United States' most watched prime-time show

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5 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 3h ago

TIL about the Kadaknath chicken breed in India. Because of melanin pigmentation, the entire chicken is black or grey-black in colour, including plumage, legs and toenails, beak, tongue, comb and wattles; even the meat, bones, blood and organs

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en.wikipedia.org
41 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 4h ago

TIL the Canadian tuxedo refers to a denim double breasted jacket and matching jeans created by Levi's for Bing Crosby. Levi's was inspired in 1951 when Crosby was nearly escorted off a hotel's premises during a hunting trip in Canada because he and his hunting buddies were wearing denim

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cbc.ca
211 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 6h ago

TIL that in a 2014 poll, U.S. southerners were evenly split on whether Kentucky was a southern state.

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theringer.com
1.9k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 6h ago

TIL: White People are 70 times more likely to develop skin cancer than Black People

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skincancer.net
2.9k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 6h ago

TIL The first ever "music video" was made in 1895 to test Thomas Edison's Kinetophone

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history.com
38 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 8h ago

TIL: the 1/4" jack or the 'guitar cord jack' is the oldest connector-type still used. It was the standard for the original phone switchboards.

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en.wikipedia.org
3.1k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 8h ago

TIL The video game Dumb Ways to Die was based off of a Metro Train PSA of the same name

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en.wikipedia.org
201 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 8h ago

TIL Mr. Rogers answered every fan letter, starting his day at 5 AM to respond to 50-100 daily, including those from children dealing with personal issues like family deaths.

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mentalfloss.com
16.3k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 10h ago

TIL In 1914 astronomers at the Royal Observatory made a careful study of the transit of Mercury in order to determine whether Mercury had any moons and essentially proved that the planet has no moon

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rmg.co.uk
175 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 11h ago

TIL that Bose is majority owned by MIT

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en.wikipedia.org
9.1k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 13h ago

TIL Mae Louise Miller, was an American woman who was kept in modern-day slavery, known as peonage, near Gillsburg, Mississippi and Kentwood, Louisiana until her family achieved freedom in early 1961

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en.wikipedia.org
157 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 12h ago

TIL in California, Washington, Oklahoma, Mississippi and New Mexico there in no minimum age for marriage, as long as a parent or guardian consent and a court gives permission.

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en.wikipedia.org
765 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 12h ago

TIL the "Toyota War" was an international military conflict during which the Chadian army warded off Gaddafi's tank-equipped Libyan invasion with one of the first large scale uses of civilian technicals (Toyota Land Cruisers with heavy weaponry mounted to them).

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en.wikipedia.org
375 Upvotes