r/todayilearned • u/staydrippy • 9h ago

TIL Men age 75 and older face the highest overall rate of suicide and are most likely to use firerms

ncoa.org

7.5k Upvotes

301 comments

r/todayilearned • u/TurnOffYourPC • 12h ago

TIL that nearly 70% of Americans play video games at least an hour each week

variety.com

16.0k Upvotes

912 comments

r/todayilearned • u/ScienceTeacher1994 • 6h ago

TIL according to the US Department of Veterans Affairs, about 31,000 US WW2 veterans are alive in 2026, representing fewer than 0.2% of the 16.4 million Americans who served during the war. The population is declining sharply, with an estimated loss of over 14,000 veterans per year, or ~40 per day.

randalolson.com

3.4k Upvotes

195 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Sebastianlim • 12h ago

TIL that Gorilla rarely attack tourists. Whenever gorillas do show signs of aggression toward humans, it is usually a bluff, or a display to show them who's in charge.

jerodiafricasafari.com

6.6k Upvotes

267 comments

r/todayilearned • u/carboncopy95437 • 17h ago

TIL in the 1st century AD, Pliny the Elder wrote that people used foam skimmed from beer to make “a lighter kind of bread.” They were using yeast to leaven bread nearly 2,000 years before scientists understood how yeast actually worked.

en.wikipedia.org

14.1k Upvotes

369 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Long__Ground • 10h ago

TIL a Soviet double agent was recalled to Moscow in 1985, drugged and interrogated for hours by KGB, and never broke his cover story. With the help of MI6 he escaped to Finland in the boot of a car. A border guard + dog almost found him if it wasn't for Mi6 agent changing a dirty nappy on the boot!

en.wikipedia.org

2.5k Upvotes

137 comments

r/todayilearned • u/fanau • 13h ago

TIL the Southern Baptists of the US broke off from the Baptists over slavery in years leading up to Civil War.

en.wikipedia.org

4.2k Upvotes

374 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Jesus_H_Christ_AMA • 20h ago

TIL that the famous 'London Fog' of Victorian novels wasn't natural weather. It was toxic industrial pea-soup smog created by burning soft bituminous coal. In December 1952, the Great Smog of London became so thick that movie theaters closed because the screen wasn't visible from the fourth row.

theguardian.com

28.8k Upvotes

686 comments

r/todayilearned • u/TheFrederalGovt • 47m 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.

economictimes.com

• Upvotes

34 comments

r/todayilearned • u/orel_ • 8h ago

TIL that in medieval Europe, people diagnosed with leprosy were given a symbolic funeral while still alive, standing in an open grave as dirt was thrown over them before they were declared legally “dead” and exiled from the community.

en.wikipedia.org

921 Upvotes

52 comments

r/todayilearned • u/LowLessSodium • 13h ago

TIL that the imperial examinations in ancient China was a system to recruit civil servants. Many candidates would inevitably fail the exam, and sometimes led to large scale rebellions and dynasty collapse.

en.wikipedia.org

2.3k Upvotes

135 comments

r/todayilearned • u/ralphbernardo • 21h ago

TIL that a secret society of American journalists, the Order of the Occult Hand, slipped the phrase "It was as if some occult hand had …" into print as an inside joke for decades, until a 2004 Chicago Tribune investigation exposed them. In 2006 the Order picked a new secret phrase and resumed.

en.wikipedia.org

11.4k Upvotes

322 comments

r/todayilearned • u/ProfessionalStuff395 • 5h 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

410 Upvotes

103 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Significant-Cold-939 • 10h ago

TIL a Dutch island was evacuated in 1859 because of erosion. It didn't shrink afterwards and today lays amidst dry land an is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

en.wikipedia.org

1.1k Upvotes

103 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Friendly-Hooman • 2h 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

266 Upvotes

40 comments

r/todayilearned • u/ShabtaiBenOron • 16h ago

TIL that "Rififi", a 1955 French crime film, featured a half-hour heist scene so detailed and accurate that it led to real thieves copycatting it and Mexico banning the film for giving criminals ideas.

en.wikipedia.org

3.0k Upvotes

34 comments

r/todayilearned • u/house_of_ghosts • 17h ago

TIL Christoph Bulwin, a German man who was jabbed by a syringe attached to an umbrella by an unidentified perpetrator while walking to his car. He was later found to have been poisoned with mercury and he died roughly a year after the attack. The case remains unsolved.

en.wikipedia.org

3.1k Upvotes

71 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Fun_Shame2727 • 11h ago

TIL Pumpkins are a type of berry known as a pepo

en.wikipedia.org

833 Upvotes

78 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Mellifloura • 15h ago

TIL that in 2020, scientists observed a group of wild boars organizing to free 2 trapped boars from a cage. The group was led by a female boar who spent 29 minutes removing the logs that kept the trap closed. The trapped boars escaped and the group left unharmed.

nature.com

1.4k Upvotes

42 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Gnomeslikeprofit • 13h ago

TIL that countries often rename the street outside an embassy. In the 1960s, the British consulate in Shanghai, China was located on "Anti-Imperialism Road". During the Vietnam War, India renamed the street outside the US embassy to Ho Chi Minh.

journals.sagepub.com

676 Upvotes

49 comments

r/todayilearned • u/EnclaveNick • 5h ago

TIL that The Henderson, a 36-story skyscraper in Hong Kong, sits on the world's most expensive commercial land plot (US$3 billion) and won "World's Best Property" at the International Property Awards.

en.wikipedia.org

125 Upvotes

23 comments

r/todayilearned • u/signaldecoderr • 1h ago

TIL scientists thought two species of marsupials had been extinct for thousands of years, but they were recently rediscovered alive in New Guinea.

smithsonianmag.com

• Upvotes

5 comments

r/todayilearned • u/strangelove4564 • 20h ago

TIL the okina ( ʻ ) is a Hawaiian alphabet letter that looks like an opening apostrophe. It marks a glottal stop, like the one between "uh-oh". The state name has no okina, but the Big Island, Hawaiʻi, does.

en.wikipedia.org

2.0k Upvotes

178 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Rhino-Kid22 • 21h ago

TIL that skateboarding was banned in Norway from 1978 to 1989 because the government feared children would suffer severe injuries based on exaggerated safety reports from the United States

en.wikipedia.org

2.6k Upvotes

163 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Recent_Flounder6011 • 8h ago

TIL Mexico and France had a dispute over Clipperton Island, an uninhabited island off of Mexico's coast. Mexico believed that it was formerly Spanish territory in the colonial era, while France claimed it as part of Tahiti during Napoleon III. The island became French in 1935.

en.wikipedia.org

210 Upvotes

40 comments

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Today I Learned (TIL)

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Frequent TILs Repost List

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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