TIL that the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, the law abolishing slavery in the United Kingdom, was repealed in 1998 due to a restructuring of English law.

TIL two rival scientists in the 1800s waged a petty, sabotage-filled war over who could discover more dinosaurs. They blew up dig sites, bribed workers, and ruined each other’s careers—yet still n...

TIL about ice worms, worms that melt above 40°F and live in glaciers!

TIL if you shuffle a pack of cards, it's likely that you have come up with an ordering of cards that is unique in human history. In fact in a 52 pack of card, there are 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,...

TIL after frontier bandit Big Nose George was lynched from a telephone pole, a doctor turned his skin into shoes, a medical bag, and a coin purse. That same doctor was later elected Governor of Wy...

TIL that Ken Allen, a Bornean orangutan nicknamed The Hairy Houdini, escaped his zoo enclosure multiple times using tools, trained other orangutans to join him, and once threw rocks at his rival O...

TIL an analysis of 5559 instances of sudden death found that 34 (0.6%) had reportedly occurred during sex; two other studies had similarly low rates of sudden coital death. Of those who died durin...

TIL after Leo Gao saw that his bank accidentally deposited $10m into his account, he fled New Zealand with his gf & stayed on the run for 2 yrs before being caught. He was paroled after 16 mon...

TIL, the active ingredient in Ozempic, semaglutide, was inspired by a protein found in the venom of the Gila monster.

TIL For decades sideshow performers showcased a real deceased man in their show "The Outlaw Who Would Never Be Captured Alive". The man in question was killed in a shootout in 1911. He was display...

TIL in 1942/WW2 the Japanese army made Allied POWs sign a pledge not to escape. Most Australians POWs signed "Ned Kelly", an infamous australian outlaw, knowing that Japanese administrators who we...

TIL a Georgia lottery winner used his winnings to attempt to build a meth empire. Less than 18 months later, he was sentenced to 21 years in prison.

TIL that until it closed in 2012 amid animal welfare concerns, Wildlife Wonderland Park near Bass, Victoria, was home to the Giant Earthworm Museum. Inside the worm-shaped museum, visitors could c...

TIL a donkey named Diesel got spooked on a hike and ran off. Five years later Diesel the donkey was spotted among a herd of elk, having assumed an alpha role.

TIL Star Trek Creator Gene Roddenberry was asked to write a series called Riverboat, set in 1860s Mississippi. When he discovered that the producers wanted no black people on the show, he argued s...

TIL In 1945 a mix of American soldiers and Filipino guerillas attacked a POW camp behind Japanese lines, an American fighter flew over the camp making noise to distract the guards, in the end the ...

TIL In 1854, Clarissa Davis, an enslaved woman, escaped from Virginia by disguising herself as a man and hiding in a box near a steamship furnace. After 75 days in hiding, she endured the perilous...

TIL that J.S. Bach was only 22 years old when he finished writing Toccata & Fugue in D minor, having been just 18 when he started it.

TIL there was so few currency in circulation in Colonial America that they resorted to cutting up Spanish silver coins into eight pieces to create smaller denominations, these "Pieces of Eight" we...

TIL More than 170 million U.S.-born people (over half) who were adults in 2015 were exposed to harmful levels of lead as children, leading to an average 2.6-point drop in IQ in affected individuals