Login

r/todayilearned

🔥 Hot ▲ 8.1k r/todayilearned

TIL that horses have no muscles in their lower legs, so their hooves act as "second hearts". A horse that can't move risks blood pooling in its hooves, which can cause tissue death starting from the hooves up. This is a key reason why leg injuries are often fatal for horses.

horses.extension.org
u/YungDDawg — 5 hours ago
🔥 Hot ▲ 6.0k r/todayilearned+1 crossposts

TIL during WWII, Britain hid its wealth 3 floors under Montreal's Sun Life building. The vault had microphone alarms, walls made of abandoned railway steel, and a door needing 2 blind, simultaneous codes. 120 secret workers sorted billions under strict oaths to keep the entire operation hidden.

acresofsnow.ca
u/TheReadingExplorer — 5 hours ago
▲ 2.2k r/todayilearned

TIL that the Ojibwe language, spoken across the Great Lakes region, has no gendered nouns like many Romance or Germanic languages. Instead it categorizes nouns as animate (tree, feather) or inanimate (river, heart).

native-languages.org
u/big_papa_geek — 6 hours ago
▲ 663 r/todayilearned

TIL Biddy Mason (1818-1891) came to California as a slave in 1851. She won her freedom in court and became one of the first black women to own land in Los Angeles. As the city grew the value of her land skyrocketed and Biddy became a very wealthy woman and prominent philanthropist.

en.wikipedia.org
u/Ill_Definition8074 — 3 hours ago
🔥 Hot ▲ 8.0k r/todayilearned

TIL After Francis I exchanged himself in spanish captivity in 1526 with his two sons, aged 7 and 8, he annuled everything he signed in exchange for his release, but the kids remained in captivity for nearly 4 years. His eldest son and heir was scarred for life as a result

en.wikipedia.org
u/Mors_Acerba — 8 hours ago
▲ 521 r/todayilearned

til that in 1999 nasa lost a 125 million dollar mars climate orbiter because one engineering team used metric units while another used imperial units causing the spacecraft to enter the wrong trajectory and burn up

en.wikipedia.org
u/Square-Message1152 — 5 hours ago
▲ 90 r/todayilearned

TIL that Neanderthals have contributed more DNA to modern East Asians than to modern Europeans, which is precisely the inverse of what most have commonly believed

academic.oup.com
u/nexxwav — 3 hours ago
▲ 2.2k r/todayilearned

TIL that Pac-Man earned $1 billion in quarters in its first year. In 1982 it made $6 billion, more than all Vegas casinos and US movie theaters combined that year

en.wikipedia.org
u/Bella-Dor — 9 hours ago
🔥 Hot ▲ 5.0k r/todayilearned

TIL Mexico since the conquest has had 130 heads of state and only one of them knew how to speak Nahuatl, the dominant indigenous language: Maximilian of Habsburg. Maximilian was an Austrian archduke who became emperor of the Second Mexican Empire from 1864 until his execution in 1867.

en.wikipedia.org
u/Solid-Move-1411 — 10 hours ago
▲ 1.2k r/todayilearned

TIL Adolf Hitler earned huge royalties from Mein Kampf and owed a large tax bill on them. Once he controlled the state, the tax authorities stopped pursuing him, showing how quickly “ordinary legal obligations” can become negotiable when power protects itself.

en.wikipedia.org
u/Emma__07 — 8 hours ago
🔥 Hot ▲ 27.4k r/todayilearned

TIL that in 2003 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, a segment appeared claiming that adolescents were having "rainbow parties" where girls would use different colors of lipstick and perform oral sex on a male. There was never any evidence to show that these parties ever took place amongst teens

en.wikipedia.org
u/MrMojoFomo — 15 hours ago
▲ 18 r/todayilearned

TIL the fastest ocean liner ever built was the SS United States, which operated from 1952 to 1969. Its first voyage from New York City to the UK took three days, averaging 41 mph (66 km/h), and the record has not been broken since.

en.wikipedia.org
u/strangelove4564 — 35 minutes ago
▲ 2.6k r/todayilearned

TIL Priceline.com once tried to let people bid on gas and groceries. It collapsed in 2000 after burning through $200–300 million, and the stock fell from $104 to $5.81 in under a year.

cbsnews.com
u/freeradioforall — 12 hours ago
▲ 266 r/todayilearned

TIL for the first time in 622 years (since the Parliament of Owain Glyndŵr) the entirety of the Cabinet of the Welsh Government is made up of fluent Welsh speakers.

nation.cymru
u/BearMcBearFace — 8 hours ago
🔥 Hot ▲ 5.8k r/todayilearned

TIL that Southwest Airlines Flight 1248 slid off the runway into an intersection because Midway was built before rules were made about distance between the runway and other objects. The weather was bad enough that one pilot remarked "I picked a bad day to stop sniffin glue" referring to "Airplane!"

en.wikipedia.org
u/MajesticBread9147 — 16 hours ago