r/todayilearned • u/bastugubbar • 4h ago

TIL that during the falklands war in 1982 the british mistakenly killed three whales believing them to be enemy submarines.

news.com.au

7.0k Upvotes

357 comments

r/todayilearned • u/TimelyConcern • 2h ago

TIL the country with the most French speakers isn't France but the Democratic Republic of Congo. Likewise, there are more French speakers in Kinshasa than in Paris Of the 212 million who use French daily, 54.7% are living in Africa.

en.wikipedia.org

2.1k Upvotes

138 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Ok_Writing_9320 • 16h ago

TIL Robert Hoagland vanished from Newtown, Connecticut, in 2013, with suspicions of foul play. in fact, he had actually resettled in Rock Hill, New York, under an assumed name, Richard King, which was not discovered until after his death in late 2022.

en.wikipedia.org

15.5k Upvotes

539 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Sairai_Mata • 3h ago

TIL about Grigori Perelman, who was the mathematician who solved the Poincaré Conjecture and refused any of the prizes that followed

mymodernmet.com

1.0k Upvotes

78 comments

r/todayilearned • u/GDW312 • 9h ago

TIL about the Murder of Lynette White which happened in 1988, initially three men Tony Paris, Yusef Abdullahi and Stephen Miller were convicted of her murder but later had their convictions overturned through appeal. Jeffrey Gafoor would later be convicted in 2003 for her murder thanks to DNA.

en.wikipedia.org

1.6k Upvotes

55 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Lucian151 • 13h ago

TIL that elephants in Kenya's Kitum Cave venture into the dark to mine salt by breaking off rocks, adapting to their mineral-poor environment.

tsavotrust.org

2.9k Upvotes

43 comments

r/todayilearned • u/thisweeksaltacct • 2h ago

TIL that the James Webb Telescope orbits a Lagrange point, a spot in space where the gravity from earth and sun (or another set of bodies) cancel one another out and satellites can orbit the spot rather than earth, giving a unique perspective.

en.wikipedia.org

388 Upvotes

41 comments

r/todayilearned • u/XiGoldenGod • 22h ago

TIL hippos can defecate into rivers so much that their feces builds up and kills fish through hypoxia, or lack of oxygen. In the Mara River, about 4,000 hippos poop out more than 9 tons of dung each day. Hippo feces also leaves behind chemicals such as ammonium and sulfide, which is harmful to fish.

usatoday.com

17.4k Upvotes

455 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Klarok • 19h ago

TIL that Lise Meittner, the co-discoverer of nuclear fission, never won the Nobel Prize. She was nominated 48 times in both Physics and Chemistry.

en.wikipedia.org

5.9k Upvotes

79 comments

r/todayilearned • u/VerGuy • 5h ago

TIL: Comet Hyakutake had the longest tail of any comet known, stretching to 3.3 AU from the comet nucleus.

en.wikipedia.org

370 Upvotes

21 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Miserable-md • 3h ago

TIL that Filet-O-Fish was created after a McDonald’s franchise owner complained about falling sales during the season of Lent

reckon.news

289 Upvotes

42 comments

r/todayilearned • u/HumanNutrStudent • 21h ago

Only American TIL about Reba Z. Whittle, an American flight nurse who, in 1944, became the only military female prisoner of war in the European Theater of World War 2. The German doctor who treated her injuries said:"Too bad having a woman as you are the first one and we don't know exactly what to do."

en.wikipedia.org

7.9k Upvotes

149 comments

r/todayilearned • u/innergamedude • 1d ago

TIL Sir Ben Kingsley was born Krishna Bhanji but changed his name and noticed an immediate uptick in job offers, from "We don't quite know how to place you" to "When can you start?"

radiotimes.com

49.3k Upvotes

1.7k comments

r/todayilearned • u/gonejahman • 17h ago

TIL Heat causes errors in the qubits that are the building blocks of a quantum computer, so quantum systems are typically kept inside refrigerators that keep the temperature just above absolute zero (-459 degrees Fahrenheit).

news.mit.edu

2.5k Upvotes

156 comments

r/todayilearned • u/tucchurchnj • 1d ago

TIL the first Scram button on a nuclear reactor had its origins in 1942 where an actual control rod tied to a rope with a man with an axe stood next to it; cutting the rope would mean the rods would fall by gravity into the reactor core, shutting the reactor down.

en.wikipedia.org

10.4k Upvotes

250 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Rubystanley4ss • 23h ago

TIL that Shavarsh Karapetyan, a former professional swimmer, heroically saved 20 people from icy, debris-filled waters. Sadly, this act ended his swimming career as he developed subsequent lung complications.

en.wikipedia.org

6.6k Upvotes

39 comments

r/todayilearned • u/MaroonTrucker28 • 31m ago

TIL of sky burial, a funeral practice in which a corpse is placed on a mountaintop and left to decompose or be eaten by vultures.

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

14 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Super_Goomba64 • 19h ago

TIL about "Wicked Problems" which is a term in social policy that It refers to an idea or problem that cannot be fixed, where there is no single solution to the problem; and "wicked" denotes resistance to resolution, rather than evil.

en.wikipedia.org

1.5k Upvotes

48 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Candle-Jolly • 1d ago

TIL that Japan received its first female fighter pilot in 2018. She was inspired as a child by Top Gun but could not become a combat aviator until the JSDF began accepting female candidates in 2015.

bbc.com

19.6k Upvotes

373 comments

r/todayilearned • u/spidey_sensez • 23m ago

TIL Princess Margriet of the Netherlands (whose family had fled the Nazi occupation during WWII) was born in an Ottawa hospital where it was temporarily declared extraterritorial by the Canadian government, so that the newborn would only inherit Dutch citizenship and not be a British subject.

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

8 comments

r/todayilearned • u/HumanNutrStudent • 1h ago

TIL the book 'Theory of Games and Economic Behavior', by mathematician John von Neumann and economist Oskar Morgenstern, led to the creation of an entirely new field of research, known as game theory, which is the study of mathematical models of strategic interactions.

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

6 comments

r/todayilearned • u/cuspofgreatness • 16h ago

TIL the first televised vice-presidential debate was in October 1976 between Republican Bob Dole and Democrat Walter Mondale. Mondale and running mate Jimmy Carter went on to defeat incumbent Gerald Ford in the presidential election that November.

mprnews.org

762 Upvotes

27 comments

r/todayilearned • u/CreeperRussS • 12h ago

TIL That Catherine Parr, the final wife of Henry VIII, married Thomas Seymour after Henry's death. Thomas Seymour was the brother of Jane Seymour, the third wife of Henry VIII. This means she was an aunt in law of her step son, Edward VI.

en.wikipedia.org

319 Upvotes

18 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Kurma-the-Turtle • 18h ago

TIL that, on 2 October 1766, a riot started an Nottingham's Goose Fair when locals began looting and hundreds of cheese wheels were rolled through the streets. The military were deployed to keep order and opened fire on the crowds. The event is known as the Great Cheese Riot.

en.wikipedia.org

891 Upvotes

17 comments

r/todayilearned • u/canadave_nyc • 13h ago

TIL in 1391, Geoffrey Chaucer, famous for the Cantebury Tales, also wrote what is considered the oldest written work in English about an elaborate scientific instrument--"A Treatise on the Astrolabe"

en.wikipedia.org

361 Upvotes

9 comments

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As of May 2024

This list was compiled from /r/todayilearned community suggestions by its members. If your TIL is found on this list, it will be removed. The titles have been abridged for the sake of brevity, however the context remains the same. This list is subject to change. The purpose is to keep content fresh on /r/todayilearned as requested by its members. If you are interested in reading about the TILs on this list use the search box feature and enter the keywords to pull up past TILs.

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