Whether people are setting up Trivial Pursuit at home or attending a pub trivia night, the basic premise remains the same: they're enjoying the thrill of providing correct answers to questions about lesser-known facts.
"You get a rush or a neuro-reward signal or a dopamine burst from winning," John Kounios, Ph.D., professor of psychology and director of the doctoral program in applied cognitive and brain sciences at Drexel University in Pennsylvania, told Healthline. "I think whenever you’re challenged with a trivia question and you happen to know it, you get a rush. It's sort of like gambling."
Only it doesn't really have any downsides.
To prepare you for these battles (or at least to make your Friday more interesting), Bored Panda snuck inside the 'Today I Learned' (TIL) subreddit and hand-picked some of the most interesting tidbits of information that people have shared there.
Oh, and if you want more, fire up our earlier TIL lists here, here, and here.
This post may include affiliate links.
TIL a woman quit her job to search for her border collie who escaped from a hotel room during a thunderstorm while on vacation in Kalispell, Montana. After 57 days of searching and posting hundreds of flyers around town, she finally found ‘Katie’ who was starving, but otherwise OK.
TIL an Austrian man left $2.4 million to the French village that hid him from the Nazis
TIL there is a group of wolves in British Columbia known as "sea wolves" and 90% of their food comes from the sea. They have distinct DNA that sets them apart from interior wolves and they're entirely dedicated to the sea swimming several miles everyday in search of food.
TIL of Vince Coleman, a train dispatcher who sacrificed his life to save hundreds, warning of a massive boat explosion nearby. The message: "Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbour making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye, boys."
TIL That elephants stay cancer free as they have 20 copies of a key tumor-fighting gene; humans have just one.
TIL In 2012 a British man named Wesley Carrington bought a metal detector and within 20 minutes found gold from the Roman Age worth £100,000.
TIL that Apples are not ‘true to seed’, so the seeds from any particular variety apple will not grow to be the same variety as the apple tree they came from. E.g. If you planted seeds of Granny Smith it likely will produce a wide variety of different and unknown apple tree types.
People still tripping about GMO foods. Learn the very basics of genetics and you will know what our agrarian ancestors have known for thousands of years. Yes modifying genetics of plants and hybridizing for positive traits is not only desirable, it's how we've managed to feed the world effectively.
TIL that in 2006, a couple lost for three nights in the San Jacinto Mountains of CA were rescued because they were able to light a signal fire from matches they found in the abandoned camp of a lost hiker who vanished exactly One year before their incident.
Three of anything is the universal emergency signal. You can make three big circles in snow to alert a plane, three fires is obviously best. Or spell out SOS in a field anyway you can, with branches, with scraped lines in dirt, whatever.
TIL that the details of the Manhattan Project were so secret that many workers had no idea why they did their jobs. A laundrywoman had a dedicated duty to "hold up an instrument and listen for a clicking noise" without knowing why. It was a Geiger counter testing the radiation levels of uniforms.
TIL when Steve Buscemi was 4-years-old he was hit by a bus and managed to survive with a fractured skull. He received a $6,000 settlement from the city that was to be collected from a trust fund when he turned 18. When Buscemi turned 18, he used part of the money to pay for full-time acting classes.
He was also an NYC firefighter from 1980 to 1984 and later volunteered during the 9/11 attacks.
TIL: Cats rival dogs on many tests of social smarts, but very few scientists have the patience to try and study them
TIL that in his acceptance speech for the 1976 Best Album Grammy, Paul Simon jokingly thanked Stevie Wonder for not releasing an album that year. Stevie Wonder had won Best Album in the previous two years and would go on to win again in 1977 for Songs in the Key of Life.
TIL that in 1982, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was rushed to hospital when a fish bone became stuck in her throat, and she ended up having an operation to remove it. Being a keen fisher, she calmly joked when it was done: "The salmon have got their own back".
TIL A bank robber in France made a fictitious, coded document which he claimed as evidence during his trial. While the judge was distracted by the document, Albert Spaggiari jumped out of a window, landing safely on a parked car and escaped on a waiting motorcycle. He was never seen again.
Ruined, Albert Spaggiari died, 12 years after his escape, from a throat cancer.
TIL that Albert I of Belgium is called the "Knight King" because he personally led his army in combat for all of WWI; also his wife, Elizabeth of Bavaria, served as a nurse in front-line field hospitals.
TIL President Lincoln’s blockade of Confederate cotton caused famine in English mill towns. Suffering Manchester workers nevertheless sent a letter of support to Lincoln and he responded with thanks and a gift of food. A statue of Lincoln in Manchester displays excerpts from both letters.
I've been past that statue many times. I was very surprised when I first saw it. But it's on a nice quiet side street.
TIL we use 100% of our brain. It is a myth we only use a small portion of our brain, and no scientific evidence supports such a hypothesis as a valid theory.
TIL that the world record for the most passengers on an aircraft was set during Israel's evacuation of Jews from Ethiopia in 1991, when a single 747 carried at least 1,088 people, including two babies who were born on the flight.
TIL the Dr. Heimlich fought against the Red Cross for 20 years over the practice of giving "5 back slaps" being a better alternative to the Heimlich Maneuver.
I was in lifeguard training, and we were taught the 5 back slap move, which seems to be better for choking on liquids (eg. some water in the lungs), and in helping babies and toddlers. Heimlich maneuver is painful, but is great when an adult is choking on hard items (eg. pieces of food).
TIL Otis Redding's widow, Zelma Redding, wrote a letter to Michael Bolton saying his cover of "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay" was her favorite. She remarked that it brought tears to her eyes as it reminded her so much of her husband. Bolton had the letter framed and it hangs on his office wall.
I genuinely don't think I've ever heard a cover of it. Gonna have to check that out!
TIL that after the Black Plague, depopulation in Europe caused a shortage of laborers, who then were able to demand higher wages for work. Some estimates state that the typical worker's wages had increased by 50 percent
TIL According to the convention of Geneva an ejected pilot in the air is not a combatant and therefore attacking him is a war crime.
TIL about "lonely negatives". These are words with common prefixes or suffixes such as "dis-", "in-", "un-", "-less" but they don't have positive counterparts such as the words "disgust", "disappoint", "reckless" - they don't have "gust", "appoint", or "reckful" as their opposites.
ive always wondered why you can be over-whelmed or under-whelmed, but never 'whelmed'. "How was the movie?" "Whelming"
"I think you can in Europe" Thanks 10 things I hate about you lol
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I've never heard them called lonely negatives, but I have heard of the absent words (gruntled, gusted, etc) called lost positives. Many of these words used to exist but fell out of use.
"Gruntled" is a real word, just a very uncommon one these days.
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I WANT TO KNOW: Why the past tense of being HANGED isn't HUNG. ANYONE? Hanged sounds stupid. Drives me crazy!!
It’s more a usage ‘rule’ (like many things in English): things are hung (e.g. pictures), people are hanged
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So what is the positive of disinformation? information or formation, or is it a double-negative and therefore positive anyway? LOL
i can see dishevelled (i hope i spelt that right) but u can never be shevelled
TIL the last French soldier to die in WW1 was killed 15 minutes before the ceasefire. He was delivering a message to his unit that soup would be served for lunch.
TIL that in USA, parents are 12.7% less likely to be happy than childless people.
TIL that the North America — and the USA in particular, has the world's most extreme weather, averaging more than 10,000 severe thunderstorm events per year, with more than 1,000 tornadoes.
TIL the U.S. military has used superstition and pretended to be vampires and ghosts to scare enemies away. They dispersed scary horoscopes in Germany, staged vampire attacks in the Philippines, and in Vietnam blasted ghost tapes which consisted of spooky music and eerie voices. Only vampires worked.
not surprised the vampire attack worked in the philippines, we filipinos tend to believe in supernatural and superstitious solely to our culture.
TIL there were no tomatoes, potatoes, blueberries, peanuts, corn, beans, chocolate, vanilla, or tobacco in the old world until about the year 1500, as they are native to the Americas. This was part of the Columbian Exchange which also included many other plants, animals, fungi and diseases.
Tomatos were also used as decorative plants in some European countries at first rather than as food sources.
TIL in WWII, Germany carried out only one land operation in north America, the installation of a secret weather station in Newfoundland. They scattered American cigarette packets and planted a sign saying "Canadian Meteor Service" in case anyone found it, and the site wasn't rediscovered until 1977.
Not true, in 1943 the Germans landed teams of over 50 commandos, all Germans who spoke perfect English to sabatoge. One member who was US born, had a change of heart and ratted out the rest, who were rounded up. But for 2 months the Germans had a full blown commando team on US soil
TIL Hitler planned to replace Berlin with a megacity, Germania, to showcase Nazi power. The plan was a metropolis of madness, with wide thoroughfares only for military parades, car and foot traffic directed to underground tunnels, and no traffic lights anywhere.
Thank God this was thwarted, and we have rational cities instead, like Las Vegas and Dubai
TIL the reason there are so many Thai restaurants in America (and the world) is because a Thai governmental program, using a tactic known as gastrodiplomacy, was established to create at least 3,000 Thai restaurants worldwide
TIL Wiz Khalifa sparked outrage in 2017 during a visit to Pablo Escobar's grave when he posted pictures of flowers at the grave's headstone. Medellin’s mayor, Federico Gutierrez, called the rapper disrespectful saying he should have brought flowers to the victims of Escobar's violence instead.
TIL in 1982, a freelance writer submitted the screenplay to "Casablanca" under a different title to hundreds of Hollywood agencies; of the 79 which read the script, only 33 recognized it, while 38 rejected it with critical notes like "story line was weak" and "dialogue could have been sharper"
the Casablanca storyline was a good fit for the pre-WW2 era... The storyline doesn't particularly fit the 1980s or the current era... Any studio in the 1980s would have noticed that. What makes the movie special is the performances by the actors. Trivia question for you: who said, "Play it again, Sam"?
TIL Bill Murray got so annoyed with producers on the set of 'Groundhog Day' that he hired a deaf Personal Assistant to handle all interactions with the studio, despite him nor anyone else knowing sign language.
Bit of a sh!tty thing to do to the assistant, unless they were in on it.
TIL Panko is made from bread baked by electrical current, which yields a bread without a crust. The unique method developed during World War II out of a necessity to cook bread without access to an oven
My kids would have loved that. Why am I now just hearing about this method????
TIL that the opening song sung by the prisoners in O Brother Where Art Thou (2000) is actually a recording from the 1950s sung by real prisoners. The lead prisoner singing in the recording, James Carter, received a royalty check four decades after having originally sung the piece.
TIL that inhaled rubbing alcohol relieves nausea & vomiting better than a prescription antiemetic widely used for chemo patients
TIL That the 2nd Wealthiest Former NBA Player Behind Michael Jordan is Junior Bridgeman with a Net Worth of Over $600MM. He Worked at Wendy's in the Off-Season to Learn the Business Eventually Owning Over 100 Franchises and a Coke Bottling Plant
TIL one of the Dead Sea Scroll caves, discovered in 1952, contained up to 15,000 torn fragments. One archaeologist spent his life piecing them together, but died in 1979 with the work unfinished.
TIL that Americans are consistently more confident than Britons in which animals they believe they can beat in an unarmed fight, with 8% thinking they could take out an elephant if needed
We got chased by a bull elephant in Kenya, I can confidently say 0% of humans could beat one in unarmed combat. I think they meant to say 'Americans are consistently more overconfident'.
TIL The common pain reliever, acetaminophen (Tylenol/etc) increases risk-taking. Its pain reduction effects extend to various psychological processes, lowering people's receptivity to hurt feelings, experiencing reduced empathy, & even blunting cognitive functions.
TIL nearly every claim by Frank W. Abagnale Jr. in "Catch Me if you Can" has been debunked.
TIL The NY Yankees used to play the Frank Sinatra version of "New York, New York" after wins and the Liza Minnelli version after losses. Minnelli complained and asked them to play her version after wins or not at all. So the Yankees began playing the Sinatra version after every game, win or lose.
TIL that Guillermo Del Toro introduced James Cameron to the Alita: Battle Angel manga in the 90's, which he fell in love with and then strived to adapt into a movie ever since by making Titanic and Avatar, in order for SFX tech to evolve enough that adapting the manga would be possible
Honestly it's a very good movie. Not his usual masterpiece level, but underrated. The only problem is it ends on a major cliffhanger.
TIL it takes the poop excreted by the climbers at Mt Everest's highest base camp five years to move through the ice and arrive at the lowest base camp, where it is consumed by climbers in the drinking water.
TIL Curtis Mayfield became paralyzed from the neck down after stage lighting equipment fell on him while he was being introduced at an outdoor concert. He discovered he could continue to sing by lying down and letting gravity pull down on his chest and lungs and went on to record an album in 1996.
TIL that a 13-year-old kid won a contest to draw their own Robot Master for the game Mega Man 4, that kid went on to be the artist of the One Punch Man manga
And One Punch then went on to be an extremely anime (if you don't already know.)
TIL That the first known accident between two airbag-equipped cars took place in 1990 when a 1989 Chrysler LeBaron crossed the center line and hit another 1989 Chrysler LeBaron head-on, causing both driver airbags to deploy. Both drivers survived with minor injuries.
In a further irony, the accident occurred near the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety HQ and test lab near Charlottesville, VA, and the IIHS obtained the cars for permanent display in its building.
TIL that medical students practice some of the more invasive exams (i.e. rectal, vaginal) on specially trained actors, who guide them through the procedure, as going through real patients from the get-go could damage the confidence of med students
I worked as a “professional patient” for nearly 10 years —I worked with third year medical students on their OB/Gyn rotations where I provided feedback to them while they performed breast and pelvic exams on me. I’m not an actor, however. The job paid extremely well and I even received recognition for my contributions to education.
TIL In an analysis of repetitiveness of song lyrics using file compression, Daft Punk's Around the World was found to be the most repetitive song, being able to be reduced 98% from 2,610 to 61 characters.
TIL The US is one of 3 countries on Earth not using the metric system, but the US N.I.S.T. says that's a myth because the US has been metric for years.
TIL: The Killers' Mr. Brightside set a new chart record, after spending 260 weeks - or five whole years - in the UK's Top 100.
TIL a survey in 2011 revealed that nearly 8 in 10 Americans believe in angels
The ones in paintings or the ones described to look like Lovecraftian horrors? That´s what I am curious about.
TIL Words that share a semantic relationship and are grouped in a specific order are called Irreversible Binomials/Trinomials. This can include things like 'mac & cheese', 'spick and span', and 'lock, stock, and barrel'.
"Lock, Stock, and two smoking barrels" was a great movie. Followed up by the sequel "Snatch"
TIL that an episode of Beverly Hills, 90210, upset many parents because a teenage character "suffered no consequences and showed no remorse" for losing her virginity, prompting the network to "punish" the characters via a pregnancy scare
TIL that Apple Records, the record company created by The Beatles in 1968, has had many legal battles with Apple Inc over the years. It started with trademark infringement in 1978 and later because Apple Records claimed Apple Inc violated an agreement to stay out of the music business.
Seems almost absurd - two groups of mega-wealthy people fighting over who 'owns' the name of a common piece of fruit.
TIL the oldest known symbolic burial site was found in a cave, south of the modern day city of Nazareth, where a nine-year old was found buried with their legs bent and a deer antler cradled in their arms. The site was dated to circa 92,000 BP, making it about 95,000 years old.
BP is before present and present is 1950 as that is when carbon(c-14) dating began
TIL: King Gillette, inventor of the safety razor, was a socialist who wrote a book describing his vision of the U.S. population living in a single utopian metropolis/building powered by Niagara Falls. Only 1 in 7 people would need to work, and it would be free of money and thus free of crime.
TIL that a man who ran a small liquor store in Orange County, CA for years — Nguyễn Cao Kỳ — had once been the most powerful man in South Vietnam, serving as a general, vice president, and prime minister.
TIL the movie "Fifty First Dates" is actually inspired by a true story. Michelle Philpots suffered two auto accidents, and over the following few years developed memory issues which eventually caused her to wake up every morning stuck in 1994 and before.
TIL of the “Muffler Men” - Large fiberglass statues that were originally designed as a single Paul Bunyan statue for a restaurant but which was never paid for or collected, so they were later repurposed as other characters and used for advertising all over the USA.
TIL that the US once had a "postal savings system" in which post offices could essentially double as banks. Many countries have active postal savings systems. The US' was discontinued in 1966.
TIL that the green slime from Nickelodeon is an edible mixture of vanilla pudding, oatmeal, applesauce, and green food coloring.
TIL the first Ford Mustang (Serial #000001) got delivered and sold before anyone noticed, and they had to trade the 1,000,001st to the owner to get it back.
After not so great sales in the late 1990s - early 2000’s. Ford polled the general public in an attempt to get sales of the Mustang back. They asked the public what they wanted to see in a new Mustang. The overwhelming response, customers loved the front end look of the 1960’s models. So the 2005 Mustang debuted with a squared-off shape that payed proper homage to the first-generation Mustang, boosting sales and making Ford Mustang fans happy
TIL the American Cold War era stealth plane, the Lockheed SR-71, was made of 92% titanium. Most of this titanium was bought through shell companies directly from the USSR. Enough was supplied to build 32 planes.
I was a buyer for Titanium in the mid to late 90's just as there was a worldwide shortage. Everyone was scrambling as the costs skyrocketed. Lockheed had heard that there was a 20 year supply in the USSR. They sent a team there to investigate, only to find it was a one year supply that it took the Soviets 20 years to mine.
TIL Blink 182 removed the red cross from the (adult actress) nurse's hat on their album "Enema of the State" because the American Red Cross told them it was a violation of the Geneva Convention.
If that's true, they were lied to. The Geneva convention rules only applies during times of conflict. If I remember correctly the album was released in 1999, during that time the the only US military activity was in Kosovo for a few months where they were operating on behalf of NATO and not on behalf of the United States. There is section about 'Misuse' of the red cross being protected by international law but it's just vague enough to suggest that this also relates to military/combat matters.
TIL that Walt Disney Imagineering developed plans to build a "tiny" Harry Potter ride similar to Buzz Lightyear, with a wand instead of a gun. J.K. Rowling, unimpressed, turned to Universal Studios, who "seemed to understand the size and scope needed" and created The Wizarding World.
She is an amazing woman who not afraid to speak out against the snowflakes of this world Who rush off to cry to mummy if challenged.
TIL: when Michael Jordan said he wore his UNC basketball shorts under his uniform in every NBA game in the Space Jam (1996 film) he was in fact telling the truth.
TIL a man spent his $2,600 life savings at a carnival game in hopes of winning an XBox Kinect only to walk away with a stuffed banana with dreadlocks.
TIL that tomatoes were only introduced in Italian cuisine after the 16th century. Although tomatoes are mostly saw as one of the key Italian cuisine and culture symbols, it's actually originated in the Americas around 80,000 years ago in Andean countries like Chile and Equator
Thank you, thank you. I was going to go back to the top to see if it was explained!!!!!!
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A very interesting article, to me at least. When the information is accurate, as it seems to be this time, it is great reading for trivia buffs like me. Thanks, BP.
BP didn't write it. They copy and pasted the posts off a Reddit thread where users there post stuff. BP don't do original content, they rip everyone else's off.
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Being an indigenous woman of the USA, I wonder why every one claims to have native heritage and gives respect...yet we are still hurt and killed and degraded, and my sisters are the most vanished people with no task force or police solving their murders. Native Indians are still hated, murdered and still considered expendable pieces of s**t.
Apparently, a German sociologist established a correlation between a nation's tendency to overestimate itself and the income disparity between that nation' poorest and its richest. Enter USA!!!!
TIL our national (The Netherlands) lottery is 50 years older than the USA is 🤯
Thank you, thank you. I was going to go back to the top to see if it was explained!!!!!!
Load More Replies... A very interesting article, to me at least. When the information is accurate, as it seems to be this time, it is great reading for trivia buffs like me. Thanks, BP.
BP didn't write it. They copy and pasted the posts off a Reddit thread where users there post stuff. BP don't do original content, they rip everyone else's off.
Load More Replies... Being an indigenous woman of the USA, I wonder why every one claims to have native heritage and gives respect...yet we are still hurt and killed and degraded, and my sisters are the most vanished people with no task force or police solving their murders. Native Indians are still hated, murdered and still considered expendable pieces of s**t.
Apparently, a German sociologist established a correlation between a nation's tendency to overestimate itself and the income disparity between that nation' poorest and its richest. Enter USA!!!!
TIL our national (The Netherlands) lottery is 50 years older than the USA is 🤯
