Subreddits
r/todayilearned 39,687,600 subscribers — You learn something new every day; what did you learn today?
Submit interesting and specific facts about something that you just found out here.
Top posts this week The 10 highest-scored posts from the last 7 days — ranking by real score over a week naturally filters out posts that got removed shortly after posting.
Post Score Posted TIL that Buzz Aldrin reported seeing flashes of light with his eyes closed during Apollo 11, and NASA later determined they were charged particles (radiation) passing directly through his eyeballs and triggering his retina, with no actual light involved 35338 6d ago TIL a drinks vendor in Germany cheated $47,000 from a bottle recycling machine by putting a single bottle into it 177,451 times. He built a wooden tunnel and magnetic sensor to pull the bottle back out every time, listening to the radio while sitting at the machine all day to pass time. 34215 7d ago TIL two Bell Labs scientists spent a year trying to get rid of a hiss in their antenna, even evicting nesting pigeons and scrubbing out their droppings. The hiss stayed. It turned out to be cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang, and it won them the 1978 Nobel Prize. 31915 4d ago TIL modern beekeeping rests on a single measurement discovered by a Philadelphia clergyman in 1851: leave bees a gap between about 6 and 9 mm and they will neither build comb in the space nor glue it shut — which is the only reason a beekeeper can lift frames out of a hive instead of destroying it. 28936 5d ago TIL serial killer Israel Keyes buried "kill kits" (buckets of guns, silencers, zip ties, Drano, and lye) across the U.S. years before using them, letting him fly in weapon-free, dig up a cache, kill a stranger, and leave. The FBI believes several of these kits are still buried today. 28095 2d ago TIL Kevin Feige almost quit Marvel after Marvel Entertainment head Ike Perlmutter tried to force Robert Downey Jr. out of Civil War due to not wanting to pay him. Disney CEO Bob Iger responded by reshuffling the corporate system so that Fiege would answer directly to him rather than Perlmutter. 25140 4d ago TIL that Madonna personally changed a scene in Deadpool & Wolverine. Ryan Reynolds and Shawn Levy had to meet with her to get permission to use Like a Prayer, and Madonna gave them a note about the sequence. The filmmakers made the change within 48h, and said it made the scene better. 22641 2d ago TIL South Korea has a rising trend of "dopamine sites"—fake shopping apps and food delivery trackers where users can customize orders and track virtual couriers. Designed to give users the satisfaction of spending without buying anything, nothing is ever delivered. 22290 4d ago TIL that Maladaptive Daydreaming is a psychological condition where individuals spend hours in vivid, complex fantasy worlds, often at the direct expense of real-life relationships and responsibilities. 21769 3d ago TIL that in 2017, scientists successfully hacked a computer using physical DNA. They encoded malware into a synthetic biological sample. When a lab's DNA sequencer analyzed this liquid, the genetic data executed as computer code, giving the hackers full control of the system. 20693 2d ago
Posting rules Inaccurate/unverifiable/not supported by source No personal opinions/anecdotes/subjective posts No recent sources No politics/agenda pushing No misleading claims Too general/can't stand on its own/how to No submissions about software/websites All NSFW links must be tagged. Pull this with the API 1 credit per page — this exact request:
curl Copy
curl "https://api.threadsnoop.com/v1/posts?subreddit=todayilearned&limit=25" \
-H "x-api-key: ts_live_YOUR_KEY"See /docs/posts for pagination, filtering with q=, and full response shape, or /docs/subreddits for the rules endpoint used above.
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