Today I Learned 🎓

09 March 2026 06:49

TIL: The last United States President that didn’t drop a single bomb on a foreign country was: Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

09 March 2026 05:49

TIL Emperor Commodus once set up a 14 days long extravaganza in the arena, which crowds were reluctant to attend because of a rumour that he was planning to reenact the stymphalian birds myth, in which "the birds" would be represented by the arena crowd and he would shoot arrows towards them [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

09 March 2026 02:49

TIL that Richard I or England and Philip II of France shared a bed as sign of friendship and a political unity in 1187. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

09 March 2026 01:49

TIL about ‘TV pickup,’ a UK phenomenon where breaks in popular television programmes trigger a surge in electricity demand due kettles being switched on simultaneously. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

08 March 2026 22:49

TIL Disneyland has had 104 deaths on park property since 1964. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

08 March 2026 19:49

TIL The Italian-American Civil Rights League campaigned to have the word "Mafia" considered a racial epithet. They were a Mafia front. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

08 March 2026 18:49

TIL the Australian ute was invented in response to a farmer’s wife’s letter in 1932. A woman from Victoria, wrote to Ford Australia’s general manager during the Depression, asking for a vehicle that was comfortable for driving to church on Sunday yet practical for hauling pigs to market on Mondays. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

08 March 2026 18:49

TIL in 2023 Disney made more profit from churros sales at its theme parks than it did for Disney+ streaming. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

08 March 2026 14:49

TIL the former CEO of Patagonia was married to the co-founder of The North Face. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

08 March 2026 11:49

TIL that 27 million tons of dust from the Sahara Desert fall on the Amazon basin annually and 43 million tons settles over the Caribbean Sea. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

08 March 2026 09:49

TIL that Pixar has a "cry formula", in 77% of their films, the emotional gut punch comes in the final 30% of the movie. The studio has made audiences cry for 30 years straight and the pattern is almost identical every time. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

08 March 2026 07:49

TIL that the Jurassic Park character Dr. Alan Grant is based on the real-life renowned paleontologist Jack Horner, who also helped production on the Jurassic Park films for scientific accuracy. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

08 March 2026 04:49

TIL that the phrase "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must" is from Thucydides' Melian Dialogue. A classic example of political realism, it describes an Athenian ultimatum to the neutral island of Melos: submit or be destroyed. The Melians chose death. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

08 March 2026 03:49

TIL HitchBot was a hitchhiking robot that relied on the kindness of strangers to travel the world. It successfully hitchhiked across Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands, but while attempting to hitchhike across the United States, it was found with its head and arms ripped off in Philadelphia. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

08 March 2026 01:49

TIL scientists recently detected radio signals coming from a galaxy nearly 8 billion light-years away, one of the most distant “fast radio bursts” ever recorded [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

09 March 2026 06:49

TIL that actresses Carole Landis and Rachel Roberts committed suicide over the end of their respective romantic relationships with actor Rex Harrison (who won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in My Fair Lady) [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

09 March 2026 05:49

TIL there’s a Brazilian film adaptation of Don Quixote performed entirely by actors with Down syndrome called Down Quixote. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

09 March 2026 02:49

TIL that in the early 1980s, Steve Miller learned that songs earn individual publishing royalties regardless of length. Using this to his advantage, he separated the 57 second long intro from his song "Sacrifice", named it "Electro Lux Imbroglio" and published it, earning thousands as a result. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

09 March 2026 00:49

TIL a 10-yr-old boy survived after he fell from a treehouse trying to escape a swarm of yellow jackets & landed face-first on a foot-long metal skewer. It went through his face, leaving six inches sticking out. However even at that depth, it didn't hit anything critical & barely injured him at all. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

08 March 2026 20:49

TIL about the the Lobster War, when Brazil declared war on France for illegally catching lobsters off its shores. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

08 March 2026 19:49

TIL the Central African Republic requires you to live there for 35 years, own land, and be awarded a national honour to become eligible for citizenship [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

08 March 2026 18:49

TIL Only one person has died so far in the Catacombs of Paris, In 1793, a man died in the catacombs. It is thought that he lost his light source and was left to die in the darkness. In 1804, 11 years later, his body was found, a few meters from a staircase that led to an exit [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

08 March 2026 16:49

TIL that the descendants of Jerry Seigel and Joe Shuster, the co-creators of Superman, receive an annual salary of around 500,000 and 25,000 US dollars each from DC in exchange for the company being able to continue retaining the rights to Superman. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

08 March 2026 14:49

TIL about the Volkswagen XL1, the most efficient car ever made. It can do 260 mpg and was limited to just 200 production cars. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

08 March 2026 10:49

TIL while all puppies from the same litter are fraternal twins, identical twins are extremely rare with only one verified case occurring in a pair of Irish wolfhounds in South Africa. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

08 March 2026 08:49

TIL Drew Barrymore financed production for the 2001 cult favorite film Donnie Darko. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

08 March 2026 07:49

TIL Urine was injected into rabbits in the 30s to test for a woman's pregnancy. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

08 March 2026 04:49

TIL piss shivers have a technical term (Post-micturition Convulsion Syndrome) and apparently not everybody experiences them. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

08 March 2026 02:49

TIL The World's Oldest Edible Ham is 122 old and going. It is maintained in the Isle of Wight County Museum, Smithfield, Virginia, USA. You can watch it on it's live web feed, The Ham Cam. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

08 March 2026 01:49

TIL About UK wrestler Adrian 'Exotic' Sweet. In a 1971 exhibition match with now infamous tv host Jimmy Saville Sweet, who openly disliked Saville, really attacked him tearing out chunks of Saville's hair. Sweet later said if he had known how depraved Saville was he would have done even worse. [Source]