Greetings, everyone! What’s on your agenda for today? Perhaps you’re tackling work facts, doing some laundry, squeezing in a morning run, or checking in on your parents. Amidst your productivity, why not carve out some time for learning?
Below, we’ve compiled a collection of intriguing facts recently shared on the Today I Learned subreddit. In just five minutes, you’ll have a wealth of new information to share with loved ones and deepen your understanding of the world.
Table of Contents
Keep scrolling to explore, and don’t forget to upvote the facts that resonate with you!
Let Start Fascinating Facts : 1.
Americans have a distinctive lean and it’s one of the first things the CIA trains operatives to fix.
2.
Until 2001 workers at Disneyland had to wear “communal underwear” while in character because normal undies would bunch up and become visible. After several outbreaks of pubic lice, the performers got the Teamsters Union involved and Disney finally agreed to employees wearing their own underpants.
3.
The Old London Bridge was crowded with houses and shops, some of them reaching up to 6 storeys in height.
4.
That the world’s largest kidney stone, removed from a patient in Sri Lanka, weighed 1.67 lbs (757.5g) and broke 2 world records.
5.
That Titan’s surface organics surpass oil reserves on Earth. Saturn’s moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to Cassini data.
6.
That when Charles Guiteau bought the gun he would use to assassinate President Garfield, he chose one with a more expensive ivory handle, thinking it would look better in a museum. Though the gun was given to the Smithsonian, it has since been lost.
7.
That the Beijing Weather Modification Office were enlisted by the Chinese government to ensure that the 2008 Summer Olympics were free of rain, by breaking up clouds headed towards the capital and forcing them to drop rain on outlying areas instead.
8.
Alexander Hamilton was the first major American politician publicly involved in a sex scandal. He had an affair with 23-year-old Maria Reynolds, whose husband was aware of the infidelity and likely orchestrated the whole thing to regularly extort blackmail money from Hamilton.
9.
There’s a rare disorder called Epidermodysplasia Verruciformis, turning people’s skin into tree-like bark with wart growths due to HPV. Also known as “Tree Man Illness,” the disorder is inherited when an individual inherits one copy, from each parent, of a defective gene.
Fascinating Facts: 10.
That China, by a large margin, consumes the most salt per citizen.
11.
Sigmund Freud dissected hundreds of eels in search of the male sex organs. He had to concede failure in his first major published research paper, and turned to other issues in frustration.
12.
That Tex-Mex has surpassed Italian as the most popular food genre in the United States.
13.
About “Cool Japan”, a Japanese government initiative since 2010 that aims to promote Japan’s attractiveness abroad. It does this by focusing on the aspects of Japanese culture that non-Japanese people find “cool” such as anime, games, cuisine etc.
14.
About Kitty Fisher, who was famous for simply for being famous. In one incident, she fell off her horse while riding and exposed herself. Broadsheets & prints mocked her, but she seized the attention for herself by having her portrait painted by England’s most prominent painter.
Fascinating Facts : 15.
That Otto Von Bismarck managed a posthumous snub of Wilhelm II, by having his own sarcophagus inscribed with the words, “A loyal German servant of Emperor Wilhelm I”.
16.
That the Rambo lunchbox by Thermos in 1985 marked the end of the metal lunchbox era. Manufacturers switched to making lunchboxes with plastic because it was cheaper and because a group of mothers in Florida complained that metal lunchboxes were being used by children as weapons.
17.
The psychiatrist Henry Cotton would sometimes extract all of a patient’s teeth as he believed infected teeth to be the cause of psychiatric disorders. If that didn’t work, he’d remove testicles, ovaries, gall bladders, stomachs, spleens, cervixes and colons.
18.
During his Flight School basketball camp in 2016, Michael Jordan was challenged by Chris Paul to a shooting drill where if Jordan missed three shots, the campers would all receive free Air Jordans. Jordan accepted and made every shot.
19.
That pro bowling balls have specially shaped “weight blocks” inside them to change how the ball curves.
20.
That among all civilian jobs in in the US, workers spend on average more than 60% of their workday standing.
21.
George Washington prevented a military coup over unpaid back wages by putting on a pair of glasses to read a letter from Congress, explaining he was “almost blind in the service of my country.” Moved to tears, his officers compromised.
22.
The NASA plans to decomission the ISS by 2031, via controlled re-entry on the pacific ocean.
23.
That “The Iodine State” was South Carolina’s nickname in the 1930s and even on license plates, in an effort to promote the state’s vegetables as having more healthy iodine than other other state’s vegetables.
Last Fascinating Fact : 24.
Former NBA Star Dwight Howard Ate 5,500 Calories in Candy Every Day for a Decade. Howard was consuming the amount of sugar equivalent to 24 chocolate bars every day.
