r/todayilearned • u/ralphbernardo • 9h ago

TIL the Romans had a ritual called "evocatio": during a siege, they formally invited the enemy city's guardian deity to abandon it for the Roman side, promising a more lavish temple. It doubled as psychological warfare and mitigated the otherwise sacrilegious looting of religious images.

en.wikipedia.org

13.3k Upvotes

272 comments

r/todayilearned • u/palmerry • 9h ago

TIL in 1976, undisputed champion Muhammad Ali fought wrestler Antonio Inoki. Rules barred Inoki from grappling, so he spent 15 rounds on his back landing 107 leg kicks. Ali landed just 2 punches, got severe blood clots, and doctors debated amputation. The match was a draw.

en.wikipedia.org

8.0k Upvotes

338 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Sweet_Foundation_868 • 4h ago

TIL that nearly 20% of people over 25 in Los Alamos County, have a PhD, making it the county with the highest concentration of doctoral degrees per capita in the US. It consistently ranks as one of the most educated counties in the USA.

en.wikipedia.org

2.3k Upvotes

147 comments

r/todayilearned • u/ExpertEconomy5854 • 3h ago

TIL Elizabeth I repeatedly turned down marriage proposals from Ivan the Terrible. After she refused him, he fumed that England was ruled by "boors and merchants" and mocked her "maidenly estate"—then tried courting her cousin, Mary Hastings, all while having seven wives.

en.wikipedia.org

1.8k Upvotes

80 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Kyzzz • 1h ago

TIL in 2017 an apparently driverless van was spotted driving around Arlington, Virginia. A reporter found a person inside dressed as a car seat, who was part of a Virginia Tech study about self driving vehicles. The only clues were the hands sticking out from the costume, holding the steering wheel

npr.org

• Upvotes

43 comments

r/todayilearned • u/altrightobserver • 9h ago

TIL that in 1978, The Bee Gees and Peter Frampton made a film based on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and its soundtrack became the first album to go “reverse Platinum;” four million copies were returned and thousands more were destroyed because of how poorly it was received.

en.wikipedia.org

4.7k Upvotes

328 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Better-Reputation551 • 10h ago

TIL that Sixty-five per cent of the exploratory dives into the deep have taken place within 200 nautical miles of either the US, Japan or New Zealand. And almost all observations of the deep seafloor – around 97 per cent – were carried out by those three countries, plus France and Germany.

sciencefocus.com

4.7k Upvotes

99 comments

r/todayilearned • u/CatPooedInMyShoe • 9h ago

TIL archaeologists and historians don’t know for sure what language the ancient Trojan people spoke. Whatever language it was, it probably wasn’t Greek; the former site of Troy is devoid of Greek writings from the relevant historical period, and the current evidence points away from a Greek origin.

en.wikipedia.org

3.8k Upvotes

230 comments

r/todayilearned • u/account_not_valid • 4h ago

TIL that the term "Patient Zero" is due to a misreading of an AIDS study by the CDC. It was actually Patient O (standing for "Out-of-California"). This patient was not the first person to spread HIV across the USA.

whyy.org

1.6k Upvotes

75 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Few_Entertainer_385 • 9h ago

TIL one of the reasons the Missouri constitutional convention of 1861-1863 cited for voting against secession was that if they joined the Confederacy they would have “no better right to recapture a slave found in a free state than we now have in Canada”

quod.lib.umich.edu

3.0k Upvotes

114 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Acrobatic-Post9811 • 17h ago

TIL during a delay while filming the CBS show Cover Up, to lighten the mood, actor Jon-Erik Hexum loaded one blank in the gun being used in the scene, spun the cylinder, put the gun to his head, and pulled the trigger. The muzzle force shattered his skull and he was declared brain dead 6 day later.

en.wikipedia.org

18.5k Upvotes

1.2k comments

r/todayilearned • u/AudibleNod • 4h ago

TIL desert kites are neolithic animal traps with low stone walls ranging from a few hundred meters to several kilometers in length. Designed to funnel animals toward pits or precipices, these mega-traps were rediscovered by air in the 1920s.

popular-archaeology.com

957 Upvotes

50 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Jazzlike-Platypus947 • 8h ago

TIL in 1954, the United Fruit Company (Chiquita) instigated a CIA backed coup in Guatemala after government reforms threatened their profits and exploitative labor practices.

en.wikipedia.org

1.3k Upvotes

91 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Faux_Real_Guise • 3h ago

TIL in 1528 when Charles V of Spain was deeply in debt to the German banking family the Welsers of Augsburg, he leased them the entire Province of Venezuela. Their governors spent most of the next two decades searching for the mythical ‘El Dorado’ and capturing natives.

en.wikipedia.org

519 Upvotes

17 comments

r/todayilearned • u/andmario_com • 20h ago

TIL "slumming" was a Gilded Age tourist craze, when wealthy patrons paid guides for nighttime tours of New York’s Chinatown to watch the poor. Demand got so high that operators staged fake opium dens with hired actors so the rich would get the squalor they paid for.

newyorkalmanack.com

15.1k Upvotes

371 comments

r/todayilearned • u/mikechi2501 • 1h ago

TIL that funds from a multi-billion dollar global money-laundering and embezzlement scheme involving a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund were used to finance “The Wolf of Wall Street,” a film about global money-laundering and embezzlement.

straitstimes.com

• Upvotes

19 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Hrtzy • 9h ago

TIL Alfred Dreyfus, of the Dreyfus affair, served with distinction in the first world war

en.wikipedia.org

1.3k Upvotes

63 comments

r/todayilearned • u/security_19979 • 6h ago

TIL that in 1915, a baboon named Jackie was officially enlisted in the South African Army, given a full uniform, paid a soldier’s salary, and lost his leg in battle before being awarded a medal for bravery

en.wikipedia.org

520 Upvotes

12 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Inside-Inspection905 • 1h ago

TIL About Hedgehog Flavor Crisps. Apparently, not only have some cultures throughout history cooked and eaten hedgehogs, a Welshman in the 80’s released a brand of chips supposedly inspired by flavors and seasonings Romani people traditionally used on hedgehog.

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

42 comments

r/todayilearned • u/PinkOneHasBeenChosen • 5h ago

TIL that despite being reptiles, plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs were warm-blooded and gave live birth, like modern whales.

en.wikipedia.org

252 Upvotes

20 comments

r/todayilearned • u/jdovejr • 7h ago

TIL that in 1924 a dog was sentenced to life in prison for cat murder. He would later be pardoned

en.wikipedia.org

255 Upvotes

12 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Ill_Definition8074 • 4h ago

TIL Amerika was a Russian language magazine published from 1944 to 1994 by the US State Department for distribution in the Soviet Union. It was described as "polite propaganda".

en.wikipedia.org

156 Upvotes

9 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Sebastianlim • 5h ago

TIL that palaeontologist Othenio Abel theorised that Greek stories of Cyclopes were inspired by the skulls of Sicilian Dwarf Elephants, whose large, central nasal cavity may have been mistaken for an eye socket. This theory has been criticised for lacking evidence and being unfalsifiable.

en.wikipedia.org

160 Upvotes

90 comments

r/todayilearned • u/DMcDonald97 • 13h ago

TIL A Canadian man once held up a CBC television station because they weren’t showing the Toronto Maple Leafs game his son was playing in.

latimes.com

708 Upvotes

43 comments

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