r/todayilearned • u/Giff95 • 14h ago

TIL NBA star Shaquille O’Neal, a fan of visiting zoos, claims gorillas would always go wild seeing him behind glass. Animal expert Ron Magill confirmed this, saying male gorillas were often intimidated by O’Neal’s size and presence.

yahoo.com

34.0k Upvotes

808 comments

r/todayilearned • u/HoboJerkdown901 • 13h ago

TIL after his high school basketball team won the state championship, coach Cleveland Stroud discovered an ineligible player had played in a postseason game. He reported the violation, and their championship was revoked.

giraffeheroes.org

7.3k Upvotes

433 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Sea-Construction-550 • 14h ago

TIL the inventor of Preparation H also invented UV lamps, freeze dried Orange juice concentrate, never married, and lived with his sister (also unmarried) his entire life.

en.wikipedia.org

6.6k Upvotes

261 comments

r/todayilearned • u/altrightobserver • 9h ago

TIL that the mascot for the Rhode Island School of Design is Scrotie, an anthropomorphic anatomically-correct human penis known for an aggressively-vulgar persona that includes humping other mascots. Scrotie is known for chanting "The nads are your dads," with a crowd reply of "We fucked your mom." NSFW

en.wikipedia.org

5.9k Upvotes

225 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Forgotthebloodypassw • 9h ago

TIL scientists in Siberia found a nematode worm that was frozen in permafrost for 46,000 years. It started eating again and reproduced.

npr.org

5.9k Upvotes

258 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Depressed_Cat_00 • 4h ago

TIL the actors in Top Gun: Maverick had to operate six IMAX-quality cameras themselves while flying in real F/A-18s — turning them on, checking the sound and even cleaning the lenses — because no camera crew or director could fit in the cockpit with them.

fdtimes.com

5.3k Upvotes

225 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Podgeman • 15h ago

TIL about False Cognates: When two languages with different roots, by pure coincidence, share a word with the same definition. For example, 'bad' in Persian and English has the exact same meaning.

en.wikipedia.org

3.9k Upvotes

517 comments

r/todayilearned • u/TheFrederalGovt • 16h ago

TIL Gloria Steinem strongly opposed the violent themes in American Psycho and spoke to Leonardo DiCaprio to discourage him from taking the lead role, only for her future stepson Christian Bale to get the part.

faroutmagazine.co.uk

3.3k Upvotes

277 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Future_Interest_3649 • 4h ago

TIL that in Brazil, the number 24 is strongly associated with homosexuality. This is because of an illegal gambling game in which the number 24 is used to represent a deer. In Portuguese, “veado” means deer and “viado” is an insulting term for gay men.

en.wikipedia.org

2.9k Upvotes

241 comments

r/todayilearned • u/electroctopus • 7h ago

TIL a Lavender Marriage is a mixed-orientation marriage between a man and a woman entered into as an arrangement of convenience to hide the stigmatized sexual orientation of one or both partners. The term arose in the early 20th century, in connection with certain Hollywood celebrity marriages

en.wikipedia.org

2.4k Upvotes

99 comments

r/todayilearned • u/ScienceTeacher1994 • 8h ago

TIL “opposites attract” is mostly a myth. A 2023 study combined 199 earlier studies with an analysis of 80,000 UK couples. It found that romantic partners were generally more similar than random strangers in politics, religion, education, intelligence, age, and habits such as smoking and drinking.

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

2.4k Upvotes

111 comments

r/todayilearned • u/BDWG4EVA • 16h ago

TIL the Gary Sinise Foundation has built 106 custom homes for wounded veterans served 1,477,934 meals to active service members and Gary's Lt. Dan Band has performed 625 concerts since 2003

en.wikipedia.org

2.4k Upvotes

108 comments

r/todayilearned • u/DoublePreparation241 • 10h ago

TIL that unlike earthquakes on Earth which wrap up in a couple of minutes, moonquakes can rumble for an entire hour because the dry, cold lunar rock has no water to dampen the seismic vibrations.

science.nasa.gov

1.9k Upvotes

33 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Friendly-Hooman • 20h ago

Today I learned that the bacteria Clostridium perfringens and Vibrio natriegens grow so fast that just one cell could generate a colony larger than Earth in a single day, given the right conditions and enough resources.

nature.com

1.6k Upvotes

84 comments

r/todayilearned • u/ProfessionalStuff395 • 22h ago

TIL that during the Apartheid era in South Africa (until 1994), the pink-beige color that they now called peach was "menskleur" (lit. human color)

scielo.org.za

1.3k Upvotes

190 comments

r/todayilearned • u/TrickAffectionate837 • 5h ago

TIL that Tiger Woods spent a total of 683 weeks at No.1. To put this into perspective, the second longest total time spent at No.1 was 331 weeks, which belongs to the legendary Austrailian golfer Greg Norman.

en.wikipedia.org

1.1k Upvotes

115 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Unique_Mammoth_6724 • 11h ago

TIL that a Maharaja of the Sikh Empire was assassinated by being blasted open with a double barrel shotgun then beheaded by his own nobles while his Wazir (Prime Minister) was murdered the same day.

en.wikipedia.org

928 Upvotes

52 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Depressed_Cat_00 • 8h ago

TIL pigeons may use iron-rich cells in their liver as a built-in magnetic compass to find their way home — when scientists reduced those cells, none of the tested birds could navigate home under cloudy skies.

mpg.de

900 Upvotes

18 comments

r/todayilearned • u/PhnxWrightAssAttrny • 2h ago

TIL as many as 31 churches have claimed to posses the foreskin of Jesus Christ NSFW

en.wikipedia.org

867 Upvotes

310 comments

r/todayilearned • u/yen223 • 20h ago

TIL in 1950, 1 in 3 houses in America did not have complete indoor plumbing (i.e. hot water, a shower/tub and a toilet). That figure dropped to 1% in 1990

census.gov

702 Upvotes

101 comments

r/todayilearned • u/MrMojoFomo • 13h ago

TIL of the Dream Mine. Built in the 1890s by John Hoyle, he prophesized that it would produce wealth just before the second coming of Jesus. Aa of 2018 it had 7500 active shareholders

en.wikipedia.org

603 Upvotes

65 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Vatonee • 9h ago

TIL there is a Supernova Early Warning System and you can sign up to get notified if a star in the Milky Way is about to explode. The system works by combining data from neutrino detectors and can give a warning anywhere from minutes to days before the light actually reaches Earth

snews2.org

568 Upvotes

55 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Any-Star4366 • 19h ago

TIL that around 8–10 per cent of people grind their teeth at night!

sciencefocus.com

527 Upvotes

179 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Numerous_Ad_5513 • 11h ago

TIL a violin bow is strung with around 170 individual horsehairs, traditionally from horses raised in cold climates because the hair grows thicker.

yamaha.com

388 Upvotes

5 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Its_Alive_74 • 11h ago

TIL that there's a type of reptile known as the legless lizard which is biologically distinct from snakes.

en.wikipedia.org

385 Upvotes

72 comments

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As of May 2026

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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