The human brain has about one billion neurons. Each neuron forms about 1,000 connections to other neurons, making up more than a trillion connections. If each neuron could only help store a single memory, you might have only a few gigabytes of storage space. But neurons combine so that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain's memory storage capacity to something close to 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes).
To put that into perspective, imagine your brain like a digital TV recorder. 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows — you could leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years.
That's a lot of storage. So why waste it? Today I Learned, often shortened as TIL, is one of the biggest communities on Reddit. It has 25.9 million members, constantly sharing interesting trivia like the location of the clearest lake in the world or the reason why Nas listed his then 7-year-old daughter as an executive producer on his fifth album. To put some of your 2.5 petabytes to good use, we rounded up some of the best posts we could find on the subreddit.
However, since you will probably have a few megabytes to spare even after you finish scrolling through the list, fire up our older publications on Today I Learned here, here, and here.
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TIL that March 12th, 1990, over 60 disability rights activists abandoned their mobility aids and climbed, crawled, and edged up the 83 stone steps of the U.S Capitol, demanding the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which had been stalled in Congress. It was called the 'Capitol Crawl'.
Nas listed his then 7-year-old daughter, Destiny Jones, as an executive producer on his fifth studio album Stillmatic to ensure she would always receive royalty checks from the album.
TIL the medals in the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games are made from metals recovered from recycled cell phones collected since 2017.
TIL: In 400BC, the Persians invented a way to make ice in the desert using evaporation cooling
TIL the clearest lake in the world is the Blue Lake located in Nelson, New Zealand. Visibility in the lake is up to 80 metres meaning the water is considered almost as optically clear as distilled water.
TIL the US provided Laos with funds and concrete to expand an airport which could serve as a base for US fighter jets during the Vietnam War. But as the funds and concrete arrived before any contract was signed, Laos decided instead to build a memorial to soldiers who died in World War II.
TIL Octopuses are one of the most intelligent creatures on the planet, capable of solving complex puzzles, using tools, escaping captivity, and planning ahead in the future.
TIL of Eric Moussambani, who had never seen an olympic sized swimming pool before the 2000 olympics. He recorded the slowest time in 100m freestyle history at 1:52.72, however won his heat as all other competitors false started. He is now a national hero the head swimming coach of Equatorial Guinea
TIL of Charlie Walker, the first non-government individual to fly into space. After NASA deemed him unqualified and rejected his 1978 application for astronaut, he co-developed a space bound device which required him to accompany it. Walker flew into space three times with the device he co-patented.
TIL Drowning people almost never shout, thrash or wave for help. 10% of children who drown are supervised by adults who don't recognise the signs.
TIL Crowing first at dawn is a privilege reserved for the highest ranking rooster.
Social status is based on the one who gets to shout first. More like a Presidential campaign
TIL Sony sold its waterproof Walkman in a bottle of water to prove it was really waterproof.
TIL Salvador Dali once conned Yoko Ono into paying $10,000 for a single blade of grass. Yoko had offered to pay that amount for one of his mustache hairs. He substituted the blade of grass because he thought that Yoko Ono was a witch and might use his hair in a spell.
TIL In the 1930's a selling point for TP started by Northern Tissue company was that their toilet paper was "splinter free"
TIL Bruce Lee was the winner of the 1958 Hong Kong Cha-Cha Dancing Championship. He kept a card with 108 different cha-cha dance steps in his wallet and developed new moves which he wrote down in a personal notebook labeled "Cha-Cha Fancy Steps."
Gotta wonder if that explains the fancy footwork he applied in his own movements. It kinda makes sense knowing this tidbit now.
TIL beavers build their dams as an instinct to stop the sounds of water leaks. If a speaker is playing just the sound of running water, a beaver will build a dam over it. This is even if it’s over concrete with no visible water, or if an actual nearby leaky water source is quieter than the speaker.
TIL astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who as a student discovered pulsars, credits her discovery to impostor syndrome and a fear of being kicked out of college; “I’m a bit of a fighter, so I decided until they threw me out I would work my very hardest". That discovery earned the 1974 Nobel Prize.
Well, Imposter Syndrome should be healed after receiving the Nobel Prize.
TIL that when his father died of a heart attack, Ronald Mallett resolved to discover time travel to see him again. He went on to earn a PhD in physics and become a professor, and has been working on plans for a time machine ever since.
Oh that's a sweet and sad and noble reason to pursue science. Thinking about time in any form other than linear is beyond me, and tangents are too complex! Butterfly effect and all that
TIL In 1908, the Russian shooting team arrived at the London Olympics twelve days late. The Russian team had made sure to arrive a few days before the event was scheduled, but Russia still used the Julian calendar. The UK had switched to the Gregorian calendar 150 years earlier
The Russian government has switched to the Gregorian calendar, but the Russian Orthodox Church still uses the Julian one! Russia switch in Feb 1918 when Lenin signed the Sovnarkom decree.
TIL dying coral reefs lack the sound attract new fish. Speakers playing healthy reef noises at dying coral reefs increases species diversity and doubles fish abundance.
TIL that hippo sweat contains a chemical that has an SPF factor to prevent them from getting sunburned.
TIL - Raccoons and skunks will literally sniff out a yellow jacket nest at night and dig it up to eat the yellow jackets.
TIL the X's often seen on moonshine bottles in old cartoons, etc. represent the amount of runnings, or how many times it was distilled.
Oh Cletus you old dog. Giving Homer a bottle with 12 or so X’s. ;) [Simpson’s Refernece]
TIL that female dogs can get pregnant by multiple male dogs within the same heat cycle, then give birth to X amount of puppies per father.
And runts. They literally were conceived later than their littermates.
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Cars too. Ovulation in cats is spurred by intercourse during heat. Each kitten COULD have a different father!
You wrote cars and i was interested to read the rest.... but it was cats😅 little disappointed i thought i would read a very interesting trivia that i didn't know
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Humans can do that too. If a woman has multiple partners and releases two eggs they can be fertilized by each father.
Yeah its something that can happen. But the chances of all the conditions to meet at the same time are so small that it barely ever happens. She needs to have non identical twins, have sex at the aproipate time with two men and that each man fertilises one egg (while usually the first man would fertilise both).
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Yesterday I learned that twins can be fathered by two different dads. I was very confused but apparently it's true!!
And even in that case, it's pretty hard to tell what the puppies will look like growing up because they all look alike regardless of who their father is. My dog's mother was supposed to be a mix between German Shepard and Husky - she ended up looking like a cheap version of the Queen's Corgis, an awkward German Shepard with very short legs. Then she gave birth to my dog, who we expected to look like her... but is more a sort of mix of Border Collie and Griffon. And in the end, it's fine, because mutt dogs are the best.
Mutts are totally the best... Especially rescue mutts
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I rescued a litter of 4 puppies. Three looked similar, one looked absolutely nothing like the other three and was also significantly smaller and developmentally behind the others. We eventually realised the 3 had one father and the 1 had a different father and was conceived after the other 3, thus younger. Very interesting.
My mother's daschund had a litter of six. Five looked like the miniature Poodle father, and the sixth looked like the yellow lab. Now, how a yellow lab impregnated a daschund is still a mystery, but....
I met a Labrador chihuahua cross. My eyebrows raised, and the owner informed me that a stack of feed sacks were involved.
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A million years ago when I was 9 this happened to our dog. She gave birth to 13 puppies, half were black and white tuxedo wearing pups and the rest were brown. They were the cutest things I've ever seen, though mother was overwhelmed and refused to nurse them. We fed them baby cereal every morning before school, 13 bowls all lined up and a mess was made!
How sensible. By mixing her genetics with various males she increases the likelihood of at least some of pups surviving if adversity should cause problems.
cats too. and it's actually happened to human women, as well. it's called superfetation. When it happens to humans they call the babies super twins. A woman in the UK recently gave birth to a pair.
Kitty cats and humans too! Yes, humans. I know a girl with a twin half sister.
Not exactly complicated - multiple eggs. It is possible, but rare, in humans as well.
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Everyone keeps saying cats. I want to know if other animals do this besides cats dogs and possibly humans.
It's very rare, but it can actually happen. It's even possible for a woman to carry twins that are different in age. She ovulates one month and gets pregnant and due to some sort of glitch in the body she still ovulates again a month later and then becomes pregnant with a second baby at the same time. With a double ovulation (around the same time or with several weeks in between) human twins can have different fathers if the eggs were fertilized by different men. EDIT i don't know why you got downvoted this much. It was not a weird thing to think and unless you got taught about it you couldn't have known since it's so rare
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TIL comedy legend Mel Brooks was an uncredited producer of The Elephant Man, released in 1980. He was left off the credits for fear that fans would believe the movie was a comedy.
TIL of Research during 1950s all-male combat aircraft assignments revealed that a woman's voice was more likely to gain the attention of young men in distracting situations. Joan Elms voice was used for the automated voice warnings for Convair B-58 and was named "Sexy Sally" by the pilots.
TIL of Vasili Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist who kept a vast collection of handwritten notes on top secret files. When he defected to British Intelligence in 1992, he brought six trunks of notes with him that exposed most KGB activities in the West during the Cold War
I'm surprised the KGB wouldn't have known that he had 6 trunks worth of notes.
TIL that the reticular activating system is the part of the brain that sorts through all the billions of pieces of information our senses take in and then allows through the important stuff. It is why after you a buy a red sedan, you now see red sedans everywhere when you didn't notice them before.
TIL that the "Monopoly Man", the guy in jail and the policeman on the Monopoly Board all have names: Milburn Pennybags, Jake the Jailbird and Officer Mallory
Also, the game was originally created to show the negative aspects of monopolies. And there were two rule sets for the game, one where everyone was rewarded when wealth was created, and second where you were supposed to crush opponents.
TIL that the Red Bull energy drink was originally invented by a duck farmer from Thailand as a hangover cure (called Krathing Daeng in Thai) before being bought over by Austrian businessman Dietrich Mateschitz who discovered it on a business trip in 1987.
Note: this post originally had 48 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
Would love to read but can't, font too small.. prob issue with apple
TIL BP is just a middle man, and I should just go straight to Reddit for all their stories.
BP is easier. It harvests whatever gets a lot of attention on Reddit. Reddit is more fun ;)
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Would love to read but can't, font too small.. prob issue with apple
TIL BP is just a middle man, and I should just go straight to Reddit for all their stories.
BP is easier. It harvests whatever gets a lot of attention on Reddit. Reddit is more fun ;)
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