You should know how to remove a fresh carpet stain before it sets in. This is a little trick I picked up in college from a roommate after a certain party where certain “friends” decided keg stands were in order… *memories* This trick has worked without fail every time (and there have been a lot of times over the years […]
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Text Version: During the American Civil War, the Union soldiers blocked supplies to the Confederacy. Due to this there were mass shortages and the newspaper offices ran out of paper. The scarcity of paper forced editors into being resourceful and to find other means of publishing, which they did. They used wallpaper to print their newspapers (this was not ripped […]
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On this day in history, November 1st… 1512 : Michelangelo’s epic ceiling painting in the Sistine Chapel was opened to the public for viewing for the first time. Michelangelo Buonarroti, born in 1475, first came to the spotlight as a talented sculpture during the early Renaissance movement in Florence. His famous statues of Pieta (1498) and David (1504) earned him a call from […]
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Special thanks to Justin V. from North Carolina for the idea to start putting up brain teasers on TIFO Though big my belly, long my nose, And with one arm I strut; I make the fair their foes expose, And keep my own mouth shut: Before me they their secrets tell, The news of all the day; And for my […]
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Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were, in my own humble opinion, the greatest comedy team in the history of show business. I like Laurel and Hardy very much; I love the Marx Brothers and I idolize the Three Stooges, but there was something so electric about Dean and Jerry. It was a new concept, a fresh idea, teaming up a […]
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Text Version: Color blindness is basically a deficiency of color vision, the most common of which is the Red-green color vision defect. People with this defect have difficulty in differentiating between red and green color hues. It is a X-linked genetic disorder as both genes for red and green receptors are located in the X chromosome. As you probably already […]
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As mentioned about a week and a half ago, starting today we’re going to be doing a lot more daily posts here on Today I Found Out than previously. We’ll still be doing the normal 5-6-ish full articles per week like always, but we’ll also be adding a few other posts daily and a variety of new series of posts […]
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Text Version: Black pepper (Piper nigrum) is commonly dried and used as a spice the world over. In earlier times, although pepper was widely well-known as a seasoning, it was very costly which only the affluent could afford. In fact, the Dutch even today use the expression “peperduur” in their language, meaning ‘pepper expensive’ for something that is very expensive. […]
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Today I found out that all humans can be traced back to a single female known as Mitochondrial Eve. This woman is thought to be the “mother” of all humans alive today. Seems like a big claim for scientists to make. So how do they know this? The simple explanation is that when an egg is fertilized by a sperm, the […]
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This is a fantastic educational video by Henry Reich from MinutePhysics (with Bonus Sun Facts below written by me). MinutePhysics also sells a few t-shirts here, if you’re interested. If you’ve got an educational video you’d like featured on Today I Found Out, you can contact me here. Bonus Sun Facts: The energy required to stop the Earth orbiting the […]
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Jack asks: Why do the British pronounce “Z” as “Zed”? It’s not just the British that pronounce “z” as “zed”. The vast majority of the English speaking world does this. The primary exception, of course, is in the United States where “z” is pronounced “zee”. The British and others pronounce “z”, “zed”, owing to the origin of the letter “z”, […]
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Today I found out Sleeping Beauty is based on a story where a married king finds a girl asleep and can’t wake her, so rapes her instead. The story is called The Sun, the Moon, and Talia, written, or at the least collected and composed, by the Italian poet Giambattista Basile. It was published in 1634 in his “Pentamerone” collection […]
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Today I Found Out has teamed up with Jeremiah Warren to show his awesome “trivia” related videos here, along with Bonus Facts included after the video by me. I hope you enjoy his videos as much as I have. “Of all the public men that I have known, on both sides of the Atlantic (and there are few that I […]
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Today I found out the Colossal Squid, which is the largest known squid in terms of mass on Earth, has a doughnut shaped brain with their esophagus running through the hole in the center. This hole through their brain isn’t very large at all with their esophagus diameter at just around 10 mm (.39 inches). Their brain itself isn’t that […]
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Today I found out the only victim of the Tacoma Narrows, “Galloping Gertie”, bridge collapse was a three legged dog. The three legged dog in question was a black Cocker Spaniel left in the back seat of the lone car abandoned on the galloping bridge. The dog was owned by reporter Leonard Coatsworth, though his wife stated in an interview […]
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Stevo asks: Is “racking your brain” or “wracking your brain” the correct way to write that expression? There are some language guides, generally the ones that pay a lot of attention to the etymology of “rack” and “wrack”, that will still say it is “racking your brain” not “wracking your brain”, but these are becoming few and far between. In […]
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One of the great things about baseball is that it’s amazing with how many games there are per season, even lifelong fans frequently see things during games that they’ve never seen happen before. With that in mind, here are a few of the stranger feats in Major League Baseball history that have only happened once to date: Pitching a no-hitter […]
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This post is sponsored by Chucker & Reibach Today I found out the first gas/electric hybrid vehicle was invented in 1900. While hybrid and electric cars are often touted by the media and automobile companies as the wave of the future, in fact, we’re more just re-hashing the wave of the past with them, but with updated technologies. Before gas […]
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