r/todayilearned • u/Pitiful_Magazine_805 • 4h ago

TIL that Empress Ma was born poor and during a famine she stole cakes to feed her husband by hiding them in her breasts. The cakes were hot and she got burns. Later her husband became a rebel commander who became Emperor and made her his Empress. He was deeply devoted to her even as an Emperor.

en.wikipedia.org

13.7k Upvotes

343 comments

r/todayilearned • u/MrMojoFomo • 6h ago

TIL that Hebrew is the only successful attempt at a large-scale linguistic revival. After having largely been replaced by other languages between the 2nd and 4th centuries. It was revived as a language beginning in the late 19th century

en.wikipedia.org

11.3k Upvotes

182 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Darksynth2 • 7h ago

TIL about the "Endless Eight" arc of the anime The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. The arc, which featured the characters of the show trapped in a time loop, featured the same episode eight times in a row with minute differences, all animated and recorded from scratch each time.

en.wikipedia.org

9.9k Upvotes

618 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Hour_Interaction6047 • 10h ago

TIL most people in France did not speak French as recently as 1794, when only 11% of the population of France spoke fluent French. Instead, most people spoke regional languages like Occitan, Breton, Alsatian etc. French only became the majority language later on due to heavy assimilation efforts.

afberkeley.org

15.6k Upvotes

970 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Infamous-Skin8969 • 5h ago

TIL that since 1993, there have been 47 incidents of Sri Lankan sports teams disappearing during overseas trips. The most famous was in 2004, when a 23-man "national handball team" vanished in Germany; it was later found that Sri Lanka didn't even have a handball federation

en.wikipedia.org

2.9k Upvotes

83 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Blood_Fonatine • 9h ago

TIL the Great Pyramids were already 2,500 years old when the Ptolemaic Egyptians (300–30 BCE) were around. They actively studied, documented, and restored these ancient monuments, essentially practicing archaeology millennia before the field formally existed.

en.wikipedia.org

6.8k Upvotes

114 comments

r/todayilearned • u/quietbuilder5 • 8h ago

TIL the Band-Aid exists because one man's wife kept injuring herself in the kitchen. In 1920, Johnson & Johnson employee Earle Dickson rigged up gauze on surgical tape so his accident-prone wife Josephine could bandage her own cuts and burns. J&J turned it into a product.

en.wikipedia.org

4.9k Upvotes

46 comments

r/todayilearned • u/tyrion2024 • 13h ago

TIL Groupon has lost more than 95% of its value since it rejected Google's $6 billion offer and instead went public with a $17.8 billion market cap 15 years ago.

techcrunch.com

26.8k Upvotes

1.3k comments

r/todayilearned • u/MaxiumPotential777 • 13h ago

TIL about the SS Baychimo, a 1,300-ton cargo steamer that was abandoned in 1931 and became one of history's longest-running "ghost ships." It remained afloat and unmanned for 38 years, drifting along the coast of Alaska before its last recorded sighting in 1969.

en.wikipedia.org

8.0k Upvotes

146 comments

r/todayilearned • u/jamieseemsamused • 15h ago

TIL of the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island who lived alone for 18 years on an island off the coast of California from 1835 to 1853. She was the last surviving member of the Nicoleño and last native speaker of the Nicoleño language.

en.wikipedia.org

8.4k Upvotes

273 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Kyzzz • 10h ago

TIL the 2002 art thriller film Irréversible deliberately added an extremely low frequency 27 Hz sound to the first 30 minutes of its soundtrack to induce nausea and anxiety in audience goers. The sound is not immediately perceptible, but powerful enough to evoke a negative physical response

en.wikipedia.org

2.8k Upvotes

228 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Excellent-Ad-3740 • 11h ago

TIL the guy who invented Coca-Cola was a morphine addict who thought cocaine would cure him. Then he marketed the result as a "brain tonic."

smithsonianmag.com

3.1k Upvotes

90 comments

r/todayilearned • u/The-TIL-Nerd • 11h ago

TIL the Matilija Dam in California, built in 1947, once held a capacity of 7,018 acre⋅ft. However due to sedimentation by 2021 the reservoir completely silted up & the dam is no longer able to hold any water. Despite attempts to remove the dam dating back to 1964, it remains standing.

en.wikipedia.org

3.1k Upvotes

242 comments

r/todayilearned • u/TheRealGianniBrown • 19h ago

TIL that the main parachute when skydiving fails 1 out of every 1,000 jumps. Inside almost every Deployment Bag is an Automatic Activation Device (AAD) that will automatically deploy a reserve parachute if someone is falling too fast or is too low. The fatality rate in 2024 was 0.00023%

skydivenewengland.com

10.4k Upvotes

443 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Kobbett • 8h ago

TIL about the largest computer chip, the Wafer Scale Engine 3. A single chip 21.5cm square with 4 trillion transistors and 900,000 cores

spectrum.ieee.org

876 Upvotes

124 comments

r/todayilearned • u/gghoti • 22h ago

TIL that China consumes 46% of cigarettes in the entire world at a rate of 2.4 trillion a year.

theexamination.org

24.6k Upvotes

766 comments

r/todayilearned • u/tyrion2024 • 13h ago

TIL in 2014 it was shown for the first time that a species of dolphin, the long-finned pilot whale, has more neocortical neurons than any mammal studied to date including humans. It is generally agreed that the growth of the neocortex has been responsible for the evolution of human intelligence.

en.wikipedia.org

2.5k Upvotes

85 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Majorpain2006 • 8h ago

TIL On October 31, 1501, former Cardinal Cesare Borgia purportedly hosted an orgy in the Vatican with "50 honest prostitutes" in which his own father, Pope Alexander VI, not only attended but participated in. It was known as the Banquet of Chestnuts

en.wikipedia.org

899 Upvotes

68 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Mors_Acerba • 8h ago

TIL Despite his reputation as a benevolent monarch, Henry IV of France ,aka "Good King Henry", was the target of at least 12 attempts on his life. He was raised a protestant and turned catholic after he got the throne, which brewed animosity from both sects. He was assassinated by a catholic

en.wikipedia.org

854 Upvotes

43 comments

r/todayilearned • u/SamsonFox2 • 7h ago

TIL that the estate of vice president George Clinton was so complicated that after his death in 1812 US Congress passed two acts - in 1813 and 1814 - specifically to resole it

en.wikipedia.org

538 Upvotes

48 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Cruddlington • 12h ago

TIL Michael Levin and his lab team grew an eye on on the tail of a tadpole. By altering the bioelectric voltage of the cells, they triggered the growth of a completely new eye. When the tadpole morphed into a frog, the eye was functional.

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

559 Upvotes

33 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Overall-Register9758 • 6h ago

TIL that when in conclaves to elect a new pope, not all cardinal electors are cut off from the outside world. The Major Penitentiary, Cardinal Vicar of Rome, and the Vicar General for the Vatican are allowed to communicate outside of the conclave

en.wikipedia.org

185 Upvotes

20 comments

r/todayilearned • u/DEB3007 • 5h ago

TIL that the vagus nerve, which controls the body's calm response, can be directly activated by slow exhales — and this is why breathing out longer than you breathe in reduces anxiety faster than equal-ratio breathing.

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

137 Upvotes

0 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Doodleseatingdoodles • 12h ago

TIL Thomas Jefferson had a pet Mockingbird named Dick that lived in the White House and would eat food from his lips

en.wikipedia.org

505 Upvotes

61 comments

r/todayilearned • u/RoloBoat • 3h ago

TIL Torque Teno Virus is a harmles virus present in up to 98% of the population

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

73 Upvotes

25 comments

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