Today I Learned 🎓

18 July 2025 17:49

TIL that Frisian is the closest language to English. It's spoken by about 400,000 people living mostly on the coast of the North Sea, with the highest concentration in the Dutch province of Friesland. Though similar to English, they are not mutually intelligible [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

18 July 2025 15:49

TIL in 2012, India’s Patent Office issued a compulsory license overriding Bayer Pharma’s patent on the cancer drug Nexavar, allowing an Indian generics firm to locally manufacture and sell the drug for just $175/month instead of Bayer's $5,500/month, making the treatment much more accessible. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

18 July 2025 14:49

TIL of Operation Moolah which was an US effort to capture a Soviet MIG-15 fighter jet during the Korean war. The US offered asylum and 100 000$ to anyone who would defect with one. The North Korean pilot who eventually defected with a MIG-15 didn't know about the reward. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

18 July 2025 09:49

TIL a company that made smart airline suitcases had to shut down operations after several major airlines banned luggage with non-removable batteries to reduce the risk of battery fires. The company claims they had sold around 65,000 suitcases around the time of the ban. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

18 July 2025 06:49

[TIL] It took U of Oklahoma students just two days to defeat a new, electronic, windshield-blocking parking enforcement device called The Barnacle, using things like defoggers, Faraday cages, and bait cars. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

18 July 2025 03:49

TIL in 2016, the CEO of human resources startup Zenefits had to send a memo explicitly banning drinking and having sex in the office after "several used condoms were found in the stairwell". [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

18 July 2025 01:49

TIL about the Amish community and their puppy mills. The Amish view their dogs as livestock and those that are bred are kept in unsanitary conditions with inadequate care. Dogs kept at these facilities get little to no veterinary care resulting in suffering and death. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

17 July 2025 23:49

TIL that in 1996 a group in England broke into an air base and used hammers to significantly damage warplanes, which were due to be sold to Indonesia. A jury found the group innocent because they felt the planes were likely to be used in the Indonesian military's genocide in East Timor [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

17 July 2025 22:49

TIL that Jason Steele conceived Charlie the Unicorn as a gift for his mother's birthday. Steele had lost his job and most of his possessions in the wake of Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

17 July 2025 21:49

TIL that in 1971, a man hijacked a Thunder Bay to Toronto flight to Havana. 30 years later, he was arrested in USA when Canadian investigators googled his name, with the sole hit being a then-recent article about his work with Bronx kids. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

17 July 2025 20:49

TIL Epona was a Gaulic goddess who protected horses and ponies. She became the only Celtic god worshiped in Rome, where she became the patroness of cavalry. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

17 July 2025 18:49

TIL of the Cottingley Fairies. In 1917, two young English girls took photos of what they claimed were real fairies. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle then published the pics as proof of supernatural phenomena. It wasn't until the 1980s that the girls admitted the fairies were really cardboard cutouts [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

17 July 2025 17:49

TIL that the first nuclear bomb test done by the United States Army, called the Trinity test in 1945, was so powerful that it melted desert sand into a unique green glass now called trinitite. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

17 July 2025 15:49

TIL that Apple’s macOS and iOS took their roots from Unix systems written in the C programming language, which was created by Dennis Ritchie in the early 1970s at Bell Labs [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

17 July 2025 15:49

TIL about Genie, a child of an abusive father who kept her strapped to a chair for the first 13 years of her life, regularly beating her and communicating to her only in inhuman growls. When she was finally rescued, the only two phrases she knew how to say were, "Stop it" and "No more." [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

18 July 2025 16:50

TIL that the Y chromosome is passed almost unchanged from father to son, which is how scientists were able to trace a vast number of direct male descendants back to Genghis Khan. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

18 July 2025 15:49

TIL a man with chronic déjà vu was "trapped in a time loop" for 8 years, which forced him to drop out of university. He was unable to read newspapers or watch TV because he believed he had seen it all before, despite not having any neurological condition chronic déjà vu patients usually suffer from. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

18 July 2025 13:49

TIL That a governor disappeared by going to Argentina for an extramarital affair. During his six day disappearance, one of the governors spokesperson claimed he was hiking the Appalachian Trail. "Hiking the Appalachian Trail" is now a euphemism for a sexual scandal. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

18 July 2025 07:49

TIL when infamous fraudster Bernie Madoff died, he was cremated (contrary to Jewish tradition) and his family refused to claim his ashes, so they are currently sitting in a lawyer's office. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

18 July 2025 03:49

TIL MC HAMMER was a true gangster and other rappers feared him. He would threaten and put out hits on other rappers who he felt discredited him, or his family. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

18 July 2025 02:49

TIL Harvard had lost original Magna Carta hiding in its archives for almost 80 years. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

18 July 2025 00:49

TIL Investigation on the Bangla 211 plane crash revealed the the pilot had been "severely distressed" and hadn't slept the night before the flight. He was crying in the cockpit while telling the story of an alleged affair with one of his trainees and was too anxious to pay attention to the job [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

17 July 2025 22:49

TIL older adults who regularly use smartphones and computers tend to have lower rates of cognitive decline [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

17 July 2025 22:49

TIL that a fringe rationalist ‘death cult’ in the Bay Area—whose members were talented data scientists from NASA, Google, and Oxford—faked their leader’s drowning, lived in box trucks armed with samurai swords, and are now linked to as many as six deaths across multiple states. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

17 July 2025 20:49

TIL that hundreds of tree seeds went to the moon with the Apollo 14 mission, resulting in Moon Trees planted all around the country during the 1970s—few of which still stand today. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

17 July 2025 18:49

TIL Crispin Glover did not reprise his role as George McFly in Back to the Future II and filed a lawsuit that created new rules for use of likeness with the SAG [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

17 July 2025 18:49

TIL that during World War I, the French planned to build a fake Paris, complete with a duplicate Champs-Élysées, to confuse German bomber pilots. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

17 July 2025 16:49

TIL: In the 1971 Supreme Court case O'Hair v. Paine, American Atheists challenged open readings from the Bible by U.S. astronauts in space. The case was dismissed because space is outside the court's jurisdiction. [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

17 July 2025 15:49

TIL of WW2 British Paratrooper Colonel Richard Pine-Coffin. His somewhat unlucky surname led to his troops nicknaming him Colonel "Wooden Box." [Source]

Today I Learned 🎓

17 July 2025 13:49

TIL Martin Scorsese is a huge admirer of Polish cinema from the 50's and 60's and often shows his favorite classic Polish films to actors and even executives before working with them. Scorsese has an honorary doctorate from a Polish university and made a list of his 21 favorite Polish movies. [Source]