30 Really Cool And Interesting Facts, As Shared By The ‘Today I Learned’ Online Community (New Pics)

There’s something new to learn every single day. Thanks to the abundance of material and information available on the Internet, it’s now easier than ever to educate yourself on a relevant topic.

#1

Image source: Four_Minute_Mile

TIL Thankful Villages (also known as Blessed Villages) are those few villages in Britain to which suffered no casualties in the First World War. These villages had lost no men in the war because all those who left to serve came home again when war ended.

#2

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TIL Finland used a lot of resources and logistics during WW II to bring the fallen to their home parishes for a proper funeral, instead of using mass graves in the battlefield.

#3

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TIL Martin Luther King Jr was a huge fan of Star Trek. He loved that it showed a future with people of all colors working together in harmony. He bumped into Uhura, Nichelle Nichols, at a convention. She said she was quitting. She ended up staying after MLK urged her to, saying she was a role model.

#4

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TIL Thought destroyed by Nazis, a priceless mosaic owned by Roman emperor Caligula ended up as a coffee table for 50 years in a NYC apartment.

#5

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TIL that an average of 2 amputations occur weekly at US meatpacking plants.

#6

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TIL that the work of Charles Drew, a pioneer in preserving blood, led to large-scale blood bank use, U.S. blood donations to Britons in WWII, and the use of bloodmobiles. He resigned as chief of the first American Red Cross blood bank over a policy that separated the blood of black and white people.

#7

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TIL that In World War II, British spies plotted to spike Hitler’s food with oestrogen to make him less aggressive.

#8

Image source: SojourningCPA

TIL in 1970 Robert White successfully transplanted the head of a rhesus monkey onto another decapitated monkey. It survived for eight days, able to smell, hear, see, and move its mouth. But it was paralyzed from the neck down, as White was unable to reconnect the severed spinal cord.

#9

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TIL that Willie O’Ree, the first black man to play in the NHL, was blind in one eye. It was caused by a ricocheting puck that hit him in the face when he was 18 and he kept it a secret for his entire 21-year career.

#10

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TIL of The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902. The French wanted rats exterminated from the sewer system. They set a bounty for each dead rat tail. Thousands of tails were submitted per day but the rat problem only grew worse. They found the hunters were breeding, not hunting, rats for their tails.

#11

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TIL that Mississippi did not make child-selling illegal until 2009, after a woman tried to sell her granddaughter for $2,000 and a car and it was discovered that there was no law to punish her under.

#12

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TIL that in the early days of crossword puzzles, the game became an object of cultural hysteria. Newspapers and magazines from the 1920’s – 1930’s warned of a “crossword craze” gripping the country’s minds. The trend was described as an “epidemic,” a “virulent plague,” and a “national menace.”

#13

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TIL The Big Ben’s unique tone is because the bell had cracked in 1859, barely two months after its inauguration. The bell is since oriented in such a way the hammer doesn’t strike the ‘crack’.

#14

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TIL about the liking gap, which is that people you meet like you more than you think. Psychologists found that “people systematically underestimated how much their conversation partners liked them and enjoyed their company.”

#15

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TIL Black Panthers are not a real species. They are jaguars and leopards who have “Melanism”, which causes them to have black skin. It’s the opposite effect of having albinism.

#16

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TIL More than 30 million viewers in Britain tuned in to watch the BBC “Royal Family” documentary in 1969, such that during the intermission, the flushing of toilets all over London caused a water shortage.

#17

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TIL in 2009 Burger King ran the “Whopper sacrifice” campaign, which gave a free whopper to anyone who deleted 10 friends on Facebook. Facebook suspended the program because Burger King was alerting people letting them know they’d been dropped for a sandwich.

#18

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TIL when Charles Darwin was sent some flowers from a friend he noticed one flower was extremely long and bet some moth with really long mouth parts exists to pollinate it. A few years later that moth was discovered.

#19

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TIL 2010 Vancouver luge gold medallist Felix Loch had his medal melted into 2 discs and gave one to the parents of a deceased competitor who died in a practice run on the day of the opening ceremony.

#20

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TIL that Poppy flowers became associated with the military after a Canadian poet was inspired by a field of poppies near a mass grave in Belgium following World War 1. The poppies grew there after the bombing and trench warfare churned up the soil, exposing dormant poppy seeds to the sunlight.

#21

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TIL that breast milk can adapt to a babies’ illness and produce more milk with illness-specific antibodies.

#22

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TIL until the mid-1990s the Italian-American mafia controlled trash collection in New York City, fixing prices by extorting or murdering competitors or requiring them to join the price-fixing cartel. After an undercover operation convicted the leaders, trash collection costs dropped by $600 million.

#23

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TIL that Tarzan actor and Olympic swimmer Johnny Weismuller and his brother were swimming in Lake Michigan when they saw a boat capsize. They pulled at least 14 people from the water, and 11 of those people survived.

#24

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TIL Brendan Fraser is the first American-born actor to be inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame.

#25

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TIL Leonard Nimoy refused to join Star Trek the Animated Series without George Takai and Nichelle Nichols claiming they were proof of ethic diversity in the 23rd century.

#26

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TIL that since Brazil could not afford to send a team to the 1932 Olympics, they sent the athletes on a ship full of coffee. The athletes sold the coffee along the way to fund their journey.

#27

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TIL the way the sun “gives” people vitamin D is by converting cholesterol in the skin to vitamin D.

#28

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TIL a man in San Francisco deposited a junk mail check written for $95,000 dollars, received the money, and built a career off of the event.

#29

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TIL that dolphins will come together to form mega-pods which can consist of over 10,000 dolphins.

#30

Image source: CaptCash

TIL: Migraines are 3 times more common in women than in men.