40 Fascinating Facts People Learned Online

1. TIL the former World Chess Champion G. Kasparov described Hungarian female chess player Polgár as a "circus puppet" and said that women chess players should stick to having children. Later in September 2002, in the Russia versus the Rest of the World Match, Polgár defeated Garry Kasparov.

2. TIL that 30 years ago you had 15-17 minutes to escape a house fire. Nowadays you only have 3-5 minutes (due to more plastics & petroleum-based products in the house as well as more open floor plans, bigger rooms, & higher ceilings)

3. TIL that Simone Segouin was a French Resistance fighter in WWII that was only 18 when Germany invaded. She took part in large-scale missions, such as capturing German troops, derailing trains, and other acts of sabotage. And she is still alive and just celebrated her 95th birthday.

4. TIL the great smog of London in 1952 was so bad that pedestrians couldn't even see their feet. Some of the 4,000 who died in the 5 days it lasted didn't suffer lung problems – they fell into the Thames and drowned because they could not see the river

5. TIL that the life expectancy number we know for the midde ages includes the infant mortality, so 13th-century English nobles had 30 year life expectancy at birth, but when they reached the age of 21, they would normally have a expectancy of 64.

6. TIL that one of the 2 co-owners/founders of Macy's died on the Titanic, along with his wife, because he refused to board rescue ships before women and children were helped. His wife chose to stay behind because she did not want to abandon her husband, so they both died together aboard the Titanic.

7. TIL that Edvard Munch's famous painting "The Scream" was painted on cardboard

8. TIL Reagan and Gorbachev Agreed to Pause the Cold War in Case of an Alien Invasion

9. TIL Years after her death, an archive of Marilyn Monroe’s poems, letters, notes, recipes, and diary entries surfaced. The archive included Monroe admitting that her first marriage, at the age of 16, was to keep her out of the orphanage when her caretaker was in the psychiatric hospital.

10. TIL that Russian President Boris Yeltsin once got so drunk at a state dinner that he drummed on Kyrgyzstan President Askar Akayev's bald head, using dinner spoons.

11. TIL Saudi Arabia accidentally printed thousands of textbooks containing an image of Yoda sitting next to King Faisal while he signed the 1945 UN charter

12. TIL that when Princess Diana died in 1997, the funeral's broadcast attracted an estimated 2.5 billion people worldwide. Which makes it one of the biggest televised event in history.

13. TIL that in the 1830s the Swedish Navy planted 300 000 oak trees to be used for ship production in the far future. When they received word that the trees were fully grown in 1975 they had little use of them as modern warships are built with metal

14. TIL that although Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture was written to include cannons firing and cathedral bells, synchronising them with an orchestra proved all but impossible. It wasn't until 1954 that composer Antal Doráti mixed a studio recording with cannons and bells, finally playing it as intended.

15. TIL mercy dogs were trained during World War I to comfort mortally wounded soldiers as they died in no man's land

16. TIL a Harvard research showed that having no friends is as deadly as smoking. Researchers have discovered a link between loneliness and the levels of blood-protein which can cause heart attacks and strokes.

17. TIL that in 2012, a survey in eastern Germany (regions formerly part of East Germany/GDR) was unable to find a single person under the age of 28 who believed in God

18. TIL Martin Luther King, Jr.'s mother was also assassinated, and his brother was found dead in a swimming pool at age 38.

19. TIL that four high-school students in the ‘70s are the reason we no longer have pay toilets in America. They created an organization called CEPTIA, and were able to successfully lobby against the issue. 8 years later, pay toilets were all but nonexistent throughout the US

20. TIL if you get a zebrafish drunk and put it in a tank of sober zebrafish, the sober fish will adopt it as their leader and follow the drunk fish around the tank.

21. TIL of a French soldier who was taken as a POW and fed only potatoes during his captivity, and survived. Feeling like he should have died, he made it his life’s mission to convince the world of the nutritional value of potatoes, and his tomb in France is decorated with potatoes as a tribute.

22. TIL If you grind a marine sponge through a sieve into salt water, it'll reorganize itself back into a sponge. It's the only animal that we know of that can do that

23. TIL In 1986, two Russian airline pilots got into an argument over whether one could land the plane without vision. The main pilot pulled the curtains over the windows, insisting he could. Then, the plane missed the runway, flipped and killed 70 of the passengers

24. TIL that the famous photo of the Soviet flag being raised during the Battle of Berlin in 1945 was actually doctored. Photographer Yevgeny Khaldei added smoke to make it seem more dramatic, and also removed one of two watches from a Senior Sergeant's wrist, as it would have implied looting.

25. TIL Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930 and further investigated it across his lifetime. He died in 1997 aged 90, less than a decade before the New Horizons launch to Pluto. To honour his wishes his ashes were launched inside the spacecraft, making it the longest post mortem fight ever recorded.

26. TIL that Johnny Cash's brother, Jack, died when he was 14 after getting mangled by a table saw after cutting wood. Johnny, who admired his brother a lot, was heartbroken. According to his sister, Johnny helped dig Jack's grave.

27. TIL about Judith Catchpole, a young maidservant in the colony of Maryland, who was tried in 1656 for witchcraft and killing her newborn child. The judge summoned an all-female jury, who determined that Judith did not kill her child - in fact, there were no signs that Judith had even been pregnant.

28. TIL that Britain's worst nuclear accident, would have been much worse, were it not for Sir John Douglas Cockcroft. Whom insisted on installing filters onto the exhaust shaft of the Windscale Nuclear Power Plant. When the accident happened the radioactive dust was reduced by 95%.

29. TIL there was a caste in medieval France and Spain who had to use separate entrances to churches and were fed communion at the end of the spoon because they were thought to be contagious. We're still unsure why they were persecuted, because they were not ethnic, religious, or linguistic minorities.

30. TIL Subway Rolls Contain So Much Sugar They are Not Considered Bread In Ireland

31. TIL Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry Potter in the film series was allergic to his own glasses. He had a nickel allergy and suffered for weeks with mysterious bumps around his eyes, where the glasses touched his face. The nickel glasses were quickly replaced with hypoallergenic specs

32. TIL the idea caffeinated coffee & tea dehydrate you is misunderstood. It's true that caffeine can be a weak diuretic - (stimulates urination) - but the loss is negated by the water in the drink itself. You're ingesting more fluids than urinating when drinking a cup of caffeinated coffee or tea.

33. TIL in 2017, a man in Texas purchased a working Sherman tank and parked it outside his house. After sending a “sternly worded letter” and realizing that they couldn’t tow the vehicle, the local HOA began issuing parking tickets on the tank. The owner left it there for two more weeks out of spite.

34. TIL there is still someone in the US living in an iron lung.

35. TIL iTunes helped save "The Office" when it reached four of the top five slots for downloaded TV shows in the platform. That’s when the people behind the show learned that their audience skewed young, rather than the white-collar workers they thought would be watching.

36. TIL the phrase "Turn a blind eye" (willfully ignore information) originated from Admiral Lord Nelson in 1801, who used his injured eye to see through his telescope during the Battle of Copenhagen when he wished to ignore his commander's signals, which resulted in their victory.

37. TIL Ants sleep by taking about 250 one minute naps throughout their day. It totals just under 5 hours of sleep. This allows for 80% of their colony to be awake, working and prepared at any given moment.

38. TIL that popcorn, being relatively inexpensive, became popular during the Great Depression. It became a source of income for many struggling farmers, including the Redenbacher family. In fact, when sugar was rationed during WWII, Americans ate three times as much popcorn as they had before.

39. TIL Stanford researchers showed that mealworms can safely consume various types of plastics including toxic additive-containing plastic such as polystyrene with no ill effects. The worms can then be used as a safe, protein-rich feed supplement

40. TIL that In the film Psycho (1960), an actress was flushing a toilet, with its contents (torn-up note paper) fully visible the first time. It was a concern, since no flushing toilet had appeared in mainstream film and television in the United States at that time.