TIL that Timothy McVeigh, the OKC bomber, ate two Taco Bell tacos after finding out he had been sentenced to death on his way to prison. He scratched off a promo ticket on the side and found out he wo
TIL that in 1833 a Boston ship owned by "Ice King" Frederic Tudor carried pond ice ~16,000 miles to Calcutta; ~80 tons melted but 100 arrived and sold for a fortune.
TIL on July 31, 1976, the night before Colorado’s 100th anniversary, thousands of people celebrating in Big Thompson Canyon had no warning before a 30-foot wall of water swept through the narrow gorge
TIL The Bayeux Tapestry is believed to have a section missing. A reconstruction of what the missing piece likely showed, the coronation of William as King, was made in 2013.
TIL that inside New Zealand’s Waitomo Cave, thousands of endemic glowworms cover the walls with pinpricks of light, giving the effect of an underground starry night.
TIL the 1783 Laki eruption in Iceland killed over half the country's livestock and at least one-fifth of its people, then lowered global temperatures enough to cause crop failures across Europe.
Ultra-Processed Foods Linked to Notably Higher Prostate Cancer Risks. Men with higher levels of UPF intake had 24% to 34% greater risks, compared with those with lower intakes. These analyses were adj
Protein sequences aren't fully determined by DNA, study finds — across more than 1,000 human samples, Northeastern researchers identified thousands of stable, abundant proteins whose sequences aren't
TIL that the Mercury Seven astronauts calculated that one of the seven would die during Project Mercury. Gus Grissom did die as an astronaut, albeit on the ground during Project Apollo.
TIL of “devotio,” an ancient Roman ritual in which a general vowed to sacrifice his own life in battle—along with the enemy army—to the gods of the underworld in exchange for victory. Livy preserves t
TIL the footballer Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink got his name because of a marriage between the Vennegoor and Hesselink farming families and they kept both surnames because of their prestige. Of means or
TIL that the iconic, cinematic "Roundball Rock" theme song for The NBA on NBC was composed by John Tesh after he woke up in the middle of the night in a French hotel room in 1989 and had to hum the en
Many US public parks sit surprisingly close to hazardous waste sites and facilities that release toxic chemicals. Superfund sites are severely polluted locations contaminated by hazardous waste, chemi
FDA Finds Bacteria in a Third of 'Sterile' Tattoo Inks. Of 118 tattoo ink samples labeled sterile, nearly a third, 30.5%, were contaminated, compared with 35.5% of samples without a sterility claim. O
Testing of 113 personal care and cleaning products (from Target, Amazon, Walmart, Dollar Tree) found 85% contained unlabeled chemicals with known or suspected health hazards, and one in four contained
TIL an English farmer Winston Howes in 1995, lost his wife of 33 years and planted 6,000 oak trees on his farm forming a secret heart pointing toward her childhood home. It was largely unknown since t
TIL that in 2006, a study found that the San Andreas fault had reached the sufficient stress level for another "Big One", an earthquake with a magnitude greater then 7.0 on the Richter scale, and with
TIL President John F. Kennedy had two caskets because the first one, an expensive bronze model rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, was heavily stained and damaged by bodily fluids on fligh
TIL the developer of the Japanese Shine Muscat grape never registered it for overseas protection, which made it ineligible for overseas royalties. As a result, about 10 billion yen is lost annually du
