Today I Learned (TIL)

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/saoiray on 2025-07-12 22:10:49+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/whistleridge on 2025-07-12 20:05:48+00:00.

Original Title: TIL of the Poison Book Project, an effort to identify and catalogue books that were printed in the 19th century using arsenic compounds and “Paris green,” and are poisonous to researchers and librarians

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/tyrion2024 on 2025-07-13 00:37:42+00:00.

Original Title: TIL it's estimated that in later Classical Sparta, women were the sole owners of 35% of all land & property. Unlike women in Athens, if a Spartan woman became her father's heiress because she had no living brothers, she wasn't required to divorce her current spouse to marry her nearest paternal kin.

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/actinium226 on 2025-07-12 23:38:34+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/leedler on 2025-07-12 23:33:54+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/collective_noun on 2025-07-12 23:01:19+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/iamveryDerp on 2025-07-12 19:10:56+00:00.

Original Title: TIL in The Office the characters Toby, Ryan and Kelly were located in “the annex” because those actors were also head writers for the show. Not requiring them in the background for scenes that did not directly involve their characters allowed them to attend to other off-camera responsibilities.

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/Mrk2d on 2025-07-12 16:08:07+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/yooolka on 2025-07-12 22:37:24+00:00.

Original Title: TIL that Josephine Baker adopted 12 children of all skin colors, creating what she referred to as her “rainbow tribe” and her “experiment in brotherhood.” The children were all brought up in accordance with their heritage and the religions that Baker assigned to them.

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/Dystopics_IT on 2025-07-12 22:34:38+00:00.

Original Title: TIL Bigorexia is a condition where someone thinks that their body is puny or not muscular enough, even if objectively they would be considered fit or athletic by other people, the condition is also called Muscle Dysmorphia. About 10% of the men going to the gym suffers from it.

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/lectric_7166 on 2025-07-12 22:10:27+00:00.

Original Title: TIL the McRib is made from bits of pig shoulder which are reconstituted with a binding agent into a larger product. Meat restructuring was developed by the US Army to deliver low-cost meat to troops, and McDonald's took the process as the government doesn't patent their intellectual property.

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/sizzsling on 2025-07-12 21:08:52+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/Watcherbiotech on 2025-07-12 18:02:35+00:00.

Original Title: TIL that Thalidomide (morning sickness drug that caused birth defects) is a chiral molecule. The drug that was marketed was a 50/50 mixture of left and right-handed molecules. While the left-handed molecule was EFFECTIVE, the right-handed one was highly TOXIC

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/tyrion2024 on 2025-07-12 17:58:07+00:00.

Original Title: TIL of the 1,213 warships involved in D-Day, 892 were British & just 200 were American. Of the 4,126 landing craft involved, 3,261 were British & 805 were American. In addition, two-thirds of the 12,000 aircraft involved in D-Day were also British.

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/LookAtThatBacon on 2025-07-12 15:39:50+00:00.

Original Title: TIL between 1999 and 2015, 736 UK Post Office workers were wrongly convicted for stealing money due to faulty accounting software. Workers were forced to pay back nonexistent losses with their own money and some were even sent to jail for a crime they did not commit.

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/WebEven620 on 2025-07-12 14:30:59+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/gullydon on 2025-07-12 17:52:51+00:00.

Original Title: TIL if you are infected by a retrovirus, it can change your DNA, and you can pass these changes on to your descendants. By one estimate, 5-8% of the human genome comes from retroviruses. Most insertions have no known function and are often referred to as "junk DNA".

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/CalabiYauFan on 2025-07-12 15:39:09+00:00.

Original Title: TIL about "John Rainwater", a fake graduate math student in the 1950s created as a prank due to an extra student registration form. The name later became a pseudonym for publishers in functional analysis, even having their own result called "Rainwater's theorem"

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/BDWG4EVA on 2025-07-12 13:04:34+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/SignalHD18 on 2025-07-12 08:02:29+00:00.

Original Title: TIL Ben Affleck’s habit of ad-libbing annoyed Kevin Smith so much during Chasing Amy that Smith told him to write his own script. Affleck ending up co-writing Good Will Hunting with Matt Damon and won an Oscar.

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/tyrion2024 on 2025-07-12 14:51:23+00:00.

Original Title: TIL the only Indian POW held in Colditz Castle during WWII, Birendra Nath Mazumdar, was shunned by his fellow inmates. To improve his odds of escaping, he staged a hunger strike to get transferred to an all-Indian camp. It worked & he escaped from the new camp & walked 900km to Switzerland & freedom

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/topnotch312 on 2025-07-12 14:39:47+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/TheSanityInspector on 2025-07-12 13:43:20+00:00.

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/HauntingBox3638 on 2025-07-12 13:22:24+00:00.

Original Title: TIL about banker's rounding, where a half-integer is rounded to the closest even integer. For example, 0.5 is rounded to 0, and 1.5 is rounded to 2. This is intended to remove the bias towards the larger number that comes with rounding 0.5 up during approximate calculations.

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The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/CoffeeChangesThings on 2025-07-12 13:11:54+00:00.