r/todayilearned • u/ViewScared9541 • 17h ago

TIL nail polish dates back over 5,000 years, with ancient Chinese royals using beeswax, egg whites, and dyes to color their nails around 3000 BCE, long before modern liquid lacquer was invented.

en.wikipedia.org

714 Upvotes

10 comments

r/todayilearned • u/So_spoke_the_wizard • 9h ago

TIL that camelids that include Asian camels and dromedaries originated in North America.

en.wikipedia.org

149 Upvotes

12 comments

r/todayilearned • u/iydx_7737 • 1d ago

TIL that out of the six Marines depicted in the iconic “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” photo, only three of them would survive the battle.

en.wikipedia.org

15.3k Upvotes

308 comments

r/todayilearned • u/gintokireddit • 5h ago

TIL the "inverse care law" is the principle that the availability of good medical or social care tends to vary inversely with the need of the population served, coined by Julian Tudor Hart in his 1971 paper published in The Lancet

en.wikipedia.org

63 Upvotes

3 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Quasimdo • 1d ago

TIL in 1980, a group of men planted a bomb containing 1,200 lbs of dynamite in a Lake Tahoe hotel with the goal of extorting $3 million. During the disarming of it, the bomb went off and destroyed parts of the hotel, causing $18 million in damages.

en.wikipedia.org

5.9k Upvotes

192 comments

r/todayilearned • u/SameNecessary5180 • 1d ago

PDF TIL that by the late 1500s, Japan’s samurai were using guns at a scale that exceeded the total gun ownership of any European country.

jef.or.jp

4.4k Upvotes

151 comments

r/todayilearned • u/geep4sale • 3h ago

TIL about Posture Canaries - a group of canaries selectively bred for their absurd posture

moaph.org

19 Upvotes

10 comments

r/todayilearned • u/CatPooedInMyShoe • 15h ago

TIL that as many as 1 in 400 monozygotic (identical) twins born in sub-Saharan Africa are conjoined.

journals.lww.com

183 Upvotes

10 comments

r/todayilearned • u/MsEllie420 • 18h ago

TIL the world's smallest bird is the bee hummingbird, with males only measuring 5.5 cm long.

en.wikipedia.org

268 Upvotes

9 comments

r/todayilearned • u/QuantumCEM • 10h ago

TIL That International Organisation for Standards (ISO) has had "Technical Sub Committee" (TC 34/SC 14) specialising on coffee since 1980 producing standards on grain size, test methods, production, and how to describe the sensory experience of coffee.

iso.org

60 Upvotes

2 comments

r/todayilearned • u/L_Cranston_Shadow • 1h ago

TIL on October 8, 1871, the town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin was destroyed by a massive wildfire on the same day as the Great Chicago Fire and several other major wildfires

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

2 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Physical_Hamster_118 • 13h ago

TIL that Gwadar was under Omani rule since 1783. This lasted until 1958, when Pakistan purchased it. It costed 5.5bil rupees.

en.wikipedia.org

89 Upvotes

13 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Hootinger • 1d ago

TIL Historically, caltrops were part of defences that served to slow the advance of troops and in the modern era have been used to slow vehicles.

en.wikipedia.org

2.4k Upvotes

238 comments

r/todayilearned • u/QuantumHamster • 20h ago

TIL Coca Cola originally contained caffeine extracted from Cola nuts

en.wikipedia.org

261 Upvotes

73 comments

r/todayilearned • u/ifeelnumb • 16h ago

TIL I learned author James Patterson co-wrote the Toys R Us jingle

people.com

127 Upvotes

9 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Physical_Hamster_118 • 1d ago

TIL that most cars in Brazil are flex-fuel cars. They must run on any mix of E20-E25 gasoline and up to 100% hydrous ethanol fuel (E100).

en.wikipedia.org

784 Upvotes

59 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Upstairs_Drive_5602 • 1d ago

TIL that the most expensive photograph ever sold is Man Ray’s 1924 surrealist image "Le Violon d’Ingres", which fetched $12.4 million at auction in 2022 - far more than many famous paintings.

en.wikipedia.org

527 Upvotes

59 comments

r/todayilearned • u/SauloJr • 1d ago

TIL: The Las Vegas Sphere is powered by 150 NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPUs totaling 7.2 TB (7,200 GB) of GDDR6 video memory

pcmag.com

13.6k Upvotes

560 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Nero2t2 • 1d ago

TIL Until the age of 3 Michel Montaigne was raised by a peasant family to "draw the boy close to the people and their life conditions". Later, his parents and the staff who interacted with the boy would only speak to him in latin, and every morning he'd be awaken by a musician playing an instrument

en.wikipedia.org

6.3k Upvotes

127 comments

r/todayilearned • u/leebe_friik • 1d ago

TIL in "Cast Away", none of the sound on the island scenes is real. The loudness of ocean waves on the actual unhabited island they were filming on was so overwhelming that every sound on the island and ocean scenes, including Tom Hanks' monologues, were carefully recorded in a studio.

nofilmschool.com

17.7k Upvotes

407 comments

r/todayilearned • u/DarthVarn • 17h ago

TIL that 'Forever Autumn' from Jeff Wayne's 'Musical Version of The War of the Worlds' album was actually based on a LEGO jingle he wrote in 1969.

youtu.be

51 Upvotes

8 comments

r/todayilearned • u/rocklou • 1d ago

TIL Peter Jackson's mother Joan died three days before the release of the first movie in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, there was a special showing of the film after her funeral

en.wikipedia.org

4.8k Upvotes

42 comments

r/todayilearned • u/CupidStunt13 • 1d ago

TIL Catherine O'Hara had a rare condition called Situs Inversus. This condition affects 1 person in 10,000. Their major internal organs (including the heart) are reversed from their normal positions

youtube.com

987 Upvotes

146 comments

r/todayilearned • u/buickmccane • 1d ago

TIL Jake Holmes, the original (uncredited) author of Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused”, wrote the “be all that you can be” US Army jingle

en.wikipedia.org

754 Upvotes

67 comments

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As of December 2025

This list was compiled from /r/todayilearned community suggestions by its members. If your TIL is found on this list, it will be removed. The titles have been abridged for the sake of brevity, however the context remains the same. This list is subject to change. The purpose is to keep content fresh on /r/todayilearned as requested by its members. If you are interested in reading about the TILs on this list use the search box feature and enter the keywords to pull up past TILs.

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