30 Rarely Heard Facts That May Leave Your Craving For Knowledge Sated, Courtesy Of This Page (New Facts)
“You live and you learn,” as a saying, remains undefeated. In fact, it’s hard not to, unless you really really enjoy living under rocks, and even there you might discover all sorts of new bugs. Fortunately, most of us actually enjoy discovering more about the world we live in.
The “Today I Learned” internet group is a gold mine for anyone who enjoys bite-sized nuggets of knowledge. Historical trivia, little-known facts, and cool science details all feature, so get comfortable as you scroll through, upvote your favorite new facts and be sure to comment your thoughts below.
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TIL that priest Father Damien worked in Hawaii for 16 years, providing comfort to the lepers. He built homes and he treated lepers with his medical expertise. He prayed and comforted the dying. He later contracted leprosy but continued to give to the people and helped improve an orphanage.
This is what genuinely caring and compassionate.religious people do - not abuse children, amass wealth for themselves, subjecate women and gay people etc or bully folk with hypocritical self righteous bs.
TIL due to efficient recycling processes, 75% of all aluminium produced world wide is still in use today
TIL Emma Gibson, frozen as an embryo in 1992, was born in 2017 to a mother born in 1991.
Found the details https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-55164607
Despite their ubiquity, most people never stop to ask what makes a fact fun. Most of the time, particularly in school, facts were everything but fun, obnoxious, confusing, and on the test, which never really makes anything enjoyable. Even now, most people only enjoy trivia related to topics they are interested in and even then, within limits.
But the real, original fun facts come from chewing gum, where self-proclaimed tidbits of information would be printed inside the wrapper starting from the 1970s. How fun or not these facts were is a question each person has to answer themselves, but in the pre-smartphone era perhaps entertaining someone, even for a few seconds, was easier. Regardless, the idea, much like gum, stuck and spread to other industries.
TIL That the Pink Panther cartoon show was created due to the success of the character in the opening credits of the Pink Panther films
TIL the humming noise produced by electricity is a different tone in Europe than it is in the US. The American electrical hum is a B-flat whereas the European electrical hum is a G
TIL that Adolphe Sax, the son of instrument designers, was prone to accidents. As a kid, he fell from a 3-story height, drank acidic water he mistook for milk, swallowed a pin, fell into a frying pan, was burned in a gunpowder blast, and fell into a river. He grew up to invent the saxophone.
As with most things in the world, even the word trivia has some degree of trivia about it. The ancient Roman “triviae” described a place or intersection where a road split into two new roads. Naturally, such areas would get a lot of traffic and become “public spaces” which morphed into “commonplace,” as there were no doubt many “triviae” dotted across that road-building empire.
TIL that when Will Smith was 12 his grandmother found his notebook of rap lyrics with curse words and wrote a note in it telling Will that truly smart people do not have to curse when expressing themselves. As a result he resolved not to use profanity in his music.
TIL Teófilo Stevenson, widely regarded as the greatest Olympic boxer of all time, was offered a million dollars to defect from Cuba and fight heavyweight world champion Muhammad Ali. Stevenson declined, asking "What is one million dollars compared to the love of eight million Cubans?"
These days, trivial is still used to describe things that really aren’t that complicated. The connection between “trivial” and “trivia” comes from Medieval higher education, where “common” subjects, grammar, rhetoric, and logic, were referred to as “the trivia.” Naturally, a student at the time would no doubt have to memorize all sorts of “trivia,” a label that seems to have stuck.
TIL that Ancient Romans added lead syrup to wine to improve color, flavor, and to prevent fermentation. The average Roman aristocrat consumed up to 250μg of lead daily. Some Roman texts implicate chronic lead poisoning in the mental deterioration of Nero, Caligula, and other Roman Emperors.
Well, the word plumbing comes from the Latin plumbum meaning lead as the pipes were all made of lead.
Their aquifer system was also made out of lead. It is highly likely that lead poisoning was a major factor in the decline of the empire.
Indeed, widespread I'll health and weakened immune systems as well as the corrosive effect on rational behaviour would account for things like the rapid spread of diseases, illogical decision making, and inability to cooperate in the face of invasion.
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not very different from aristocrats today using botox to "prevent fermentation"
Quantity would be quite different. Plus, botox does have legit medical use and doesn't build up in the body
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You mean if we're lucky they'll kill us all off before the climate collapses? Whew, I already thought we were in trouble for that.
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I read that lead also was an ingredient in makeup. Ladies would paint their faces with a lead paste to look pale, which was the fashion.
Interestingly there has been research which suggests that as late as the 1970s the lead in vehicle fumes correlated with violence crime. When countries switched to lead free, there seems to be a drop in low level societal violence 10-20 years later, corresponding to measurable declines in atmospheric lead. So, in fact, it wasn't just Roman's who poisoned themselves with lead...
Yep. There are also Australian and US studies showing statistically significant links between unrenovated areas rich in lead paint and violent crime (corrected for socio-economic factors.)
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Lead tastes sweet, and it's why it was incredibly deleterious that baby & toddler toys were so often painted using lead white; if it chipped when they were sucking/chewing/biting on the toy it tasted sweet, so they kept doing it. I hope I don't need to explain just how harmful heavy metals like lead can be to the growing brain of a small child. Likewise, it's not really surprising to learn that the prolific availability of lead to small humans for several generations is thought to have triggered various pretty catastrophic social behaviours, attitudes, norms and impacts on those same generations. For instance it's thought that boomers are the way they are due to them being the last generation exposed to leaded petrol in their formative years!
Nero and Caligula were both known for being crazy, merciless, and and overall cruel rulers. All are symptoms of lead poisoning. Edit: Wording and clarity.
The lead reacts with vinegar to form something called "sugar of lead" so it made the wine sweet in addition to poisonous.
"Emperor Nero! Rome is burning!" "Pass me my fiddle!" "Sire! I fear the lead has corrupted you!" "Pass me my fiddle or I'll cut your penis off and feed it to a wild dog!"
Let’s not forget the Roman plumbing system being made from lead pipes.
That's a lot of lead. And why would they want to prevent fermentation in wine? Isn't fermentation the point?
Fermentation converts grape juice into wine, then wine into vinegar. They want to stop at wine.
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They still try that in modern times except it's Yellow Dye #67 and Red Dye #82. It makes the food pretty. Don't worry about the cancer stuff.
I guess when your average lifespan was 25-30, you could be a baller.
At least they didn't put Radium in their butts. I'm looking at you M'erica.
Maybe because they are alright. Over 5 billion people got vaccinated without the mass deaths predicted by anti vaxxers
Load More Replies...TIL at least one of the victims of the Vesuvius Eruption in 79 C.E was found with a vitrified brain. In other words their brain was turned to glass due to the extreme heat.
TIL In 1973, Keith Moon, the drummer for rock band The Who, passed out in the middle of a show. A random guy from the audience named Scot Halpin walked on stage and filled in on drums to finish the show.
However, about seven hundred years would pass between Medieval students and trivia as we see it today. In 1902, British aphorist Logan Pearsall Smith wrote “I know too much; I have stuffed too many of the facts of History and Science into my intellectuals. My eyes have grown dim over books; believing in geological periods, cave dwellers, Chinese Dynasties, and the fixed stars has prematurely aged me,” reflecting the overwhelming amount of knowledge he had accumulated.
TIL toilet paper wasn’t “splinter free” until the 1930’s
TIL the biohazard symbol didn't symbolize or refer to anything originally. It's simply a shape that was picked as being symmetrical, hard to mistake, and easy to remember
TIL that Brooke Greenberg, who died in 2013, had ‘Syndrome X’, which made her remain physically and cognitively similar to a 1 year old, despite being 20 years old at the time of her death.
But it wouldn’t be until the 1960s that this idea would really take off as a means of general entertainment. A game titled “Trivia” was published on February 5, 1965, by Ed Goodgold, who also started some of the first contests with the help of Dan Carlinsky. As it always happens, the year, their names, and general information about “trivia” have all become trivia and fun facts.
TIL that in 2005, a Ph.D. student at the University of British Columbia nominated a fire hydrant to run for the Board of Governors (and even acted as its "translator"). The hydrant pulled in 900 votes, missing a seat by six ballots.
When I was in college, they put name signs on everyone's doors in the dorm. To make thing interesting some of my friends put the name "Turner Heaton" on the utility room. He got newsletters from the Resident Assistant the whole year. I also understand they signed him up for a couple things on campus.
TIL that the place Julius Caesar was murdered, “Torre Argentina,” is now a cat sanctuary.
I've been there. You can't go into the ruins but you can see the place where he was stabbed. The cats live there and we went to the sanctuary as well, this was 5 years ago.
TIL Women’s shirt buttons are on the left-hand side because wealthy women used to be dressed by their maids and it was easier to access.
In those circles where women were dressed by maids, weren't men also dressed by valets?
TIL that the Soviet space probe Phobos-2, , designed to explore Mars' moons, failed because 2 of its 3 computers died, and since it used a system where the computers voted on any decision, the 1 healthy computer was unable to outvote 2 dead computers
TIL the meerkat is the world's most murderous mammal with 20% of all meerkats being violently killed by another meerkat, most commonly their mother, sister, or aunt
Wow. Frankly I would have thought humans might take the top spot. But there's always meerkats to make me feel better about mankind!
TIL Song titles can't be copyrighted. You can legally title a song "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Stairway to Heaven", "Smells Like Teen Spirit" or any other already used song title.
TIL; "Hello" came to prominence as a greeting with the invention of the telephone
TIL that the least obese country in the world is Vietnam. Its obesity rates stands at only 2.1%, which is lower than Uganda (5.3%), and significantly lower than the U.S. (41.9%)
USA : Percent of adults aged 20 and over with overweight, including obesity: 73.6% (2017-2018) Source: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey
TIL 98% of passengers involved in vehicle crashes in Dubai were not wearing seat belts
I don’t know much about Dubai but what I have learned is that it’s filled with idiot rich people
Til Americans have accumulated $21 billion Worth of unused gift cards. Almost 2/3 of people have a card and half of those will likely lose the gift card before using it
TIL that Bud Light's big marketing push in the 80s was Spuds Mackenzie, a dog presented as "a cool dude". Spuds was played by a female dog, named Honey Tree Evil Eye.
TIL Crows and other bird species will coat themselves in ants. Researchers aren’t sure why birds do this, but have called the process “anting”.
TIL Charles Manson hypnotized Danny Trejo when they were in jail together.
TIL Carrie Fisher’s ashes were placed inside a giant Prozac Pill
TIL that Edward Teller, the physicist who advocated for Oppenheimer to lose his security clearance suggested using nukes to create artifical harbours, fracking oil and preventing hurricanes
Note: this post originally had 77 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
If you liked this list, _don't_ go to 31 Interesting Facts That Might Surprise You, As Shared On 'Factologys'.
If you liked this list, _don't_ go to 31 Interesting Facts That Might Surprise You, As Shared On 'Factologys'.
