Salt Peanuts!

TIL of Scientists who dropped off closed boxes in a remote Ethiopian village containing tablets, taped shut, with no instructions. Within 5 months, the children had not only learned to use 47 apps, but also managed to hack the Android OS.

TIL that Penis Captivus is a rare occurrence in intercourse when the muscles in the vagina clamp down on the penis much more firmly than usual (a form of vaginismus), making it impossible for the penis to withdraw from the vagina.

TIL of Peter O'Connor, an Irish Olympian forced to compete under Great Britain due to a rule change. Unhappy with this, he smuggled in a green Irish flag and proceeded to scale Britain's flag pole during the award ceremony. He waved his flag at the top while his teammate guarded the bottom.

TIL New York, London, and Paris have fake buildings on residential streets that hide subway vents and other infrastructure. These are essentially facades with no building behind them.

TIL of Zhang Jing­chuan, a Chinese mountaineer who survived a taliban execution at a 13,000-foot base camp. He knocked an attacker, hid barefoot in his underwear for an hour in a ravine, snuck back in a tent to get a jacket and a satellite phone, hiked to safety and called the local emergency line

TIL - Elephants can recognize themselves in a mirror, and also passed a body awareness test. These two tests are very rarely passed by non-primates.

TIL that although Adolf Hitler had no children, there are still five living members of his extended family who have all sworn never to have kids of their own so that his infamous bloodline dies with them

TIL Manga is so popular in Japan that the country uses more paper for printing Manga than toilet paper.

TIL At 40, women's chance of conceiving a child with Down syndrome is one in 100; at 45 it's one in 30.

TIL of a woman who was able to smell Parkinson's disease. In a study she was able to accurately identify 11/12 patients with Parkinson's. And not a year later the last patient was also diagnosed, making her record 12/12.

TIL not long before his death, Freddie Mercury, confined to his bed, got to see an advance copy of the "Wayne's World" scene with Wayne and Garth headbanging to "Bohemian Rhapsody". He loved it and approved of the song's use in the film. The movie, in part, helped launch Queen's comeback in the USA

TIL a rodent that was believed to be extinct for 113 years casually showed up on the handrail at the front porch of an ecolodge in Colombia and let researchers photograph it for two hours before disappearing into the night, after which it was never seen again

TIL Lincoln was famous for his self-deprecating sense of humor. When accused of being two-faced, Lincoln replied, “Honestly, if I were two-faced, would I be showing you this one?”

TIL the Bermuda Triangle isn't really some mysterious area of unknown dangers. In fact, it's one of the most heavily traveled shipping lanes in the world. Most of the mysterious "incidents" were found to be spurious, inaccurately reported, or embellished by later authors.

TIL: Patients respond significantly better to placebo medications when told that they cost $1500 a pill.

TIL an almost perfectly preserved dinosaur was found in a Canadian oil sands mine in 2011. The 2,500 pound fossil was unveiled to the public in 2017 and is currently on display at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Alberta, Canada.

TIL Star Wars composer John William's son is the lead singer for the rock group Toto

TIL 20th Century Fox made so much off of Return of the Jedi that they were looking for a tax write-off, so they paid for the entirety of a film with little faith behind it: Revenge of the Nerds.

TIL AA (South Africa's equivalent of AAA) will send armed guards to your location in the event of a car break down

TIL when firing the Germans biggest cannon in WW1, they had to move 300 yards away and fire it electrically. They were still so close they required cotton wadding in their eyes, nose and ears, and fired it with their mouth open to prevent the gun from blowing out their ear drums.

TIL NYC's Roosevelt Island doesn't have a need for garbage trucks and weekly trash pick up. Instead there is an automated vacuum collection. Put your garbage into a porthole and it's transported via underground high speed pneumatic tubes to a centralized location where it's finally picked up.

TIL archeologists discovered a hidden message on a 2,600 year old piece of pottery. The message was written in ancient Hebrew and it says "If there is any wine, send it."

TIL former Mafia hitman Frank Sheeran confessed on his deathbed that he was the one who murdered union leader Jimmy Hoffa, his close friend, under orders from the mob. Martin Scorsese is currently filming a movie on this.

TIL along with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Bombing of Tokyo was just as bad but often overlooked. Over 100,000 people were killed, several times that number injured, and 1,000,000 displaced in a napalm-filled, incendiary bomb attack by 334 low-flying B-29 bombers.

TIL Black GIs coming to wartime Britain found a relatively liberal attitude to segregation. They still weren't allowed to mix with American whites, but had no restriction on mixing with British whites.

TIL M*A*S*H didn't have a laugh track when it was broadcast overseas in the UK, this was how the show's creator intended it. However, in the United States CBS required a laugh track because they had never produced a comedy without one.

TIL there is a sport call Archery Tag that is basically like dodgeball, but with foam-tipped arrows.

TIL a tiger is heavily favored in a fight with a lion and a tiger once killed a lion with a single paw swipe at a zoo in Turkey

TIL Janusz Korczak was a man who accompanied 192 orphans to a concentration camp, refusing to save himself, while cheering and entertaining the children. He boarded the trains with them and was never heard from again.

TIL: That cruise ships cause significant environmental harm by burning bunker fuel, the "nastiest and deadliest" fuel in the world.

TIL horses can communicate with humans by pointing to symbols. Researchers trained the horses to understand 3 symbols which meant “blanket on,” “blanket off,” and “no change.” After training they were tested in different weather conditions and researchers found the choices matched the weather.

TIL Upon reading all of the 18 volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica he had received as gift for his enthronement, Shah Fat'h Ali of Persia decided to change his official title to include "Most Formidable Lord and Master of the Encyclopaedia Britannica"

TIL It took 200,000 years for our human population to reach 1 billion—and only 200 years to reach 7 billion.

TIL that there exists a dying Mexican language called Ayapenaco. The only two people left in the world that can speak it are a pair of elderly men who refused to talk to each other until 2014 when they decided to make amends to try to prevent the language from going extinct.

TIL of Julio Macias Gonzalez, a 17 year old from Mexico City, who died after his girlfriend gave him a hickey. The suction resulted in a blood clot, which traveled to his brain, causing a stroke.

TIL that Usain Bolt was offered a position as wide receiver in the NFL and rejected it due to the hits NFL players take.

TIL that NYC water pressure can reach up to the 6th floor. Taller buildings require a water tower installed on the roof. There are only two companies in NYC who make those towers.

TIL in 2013 police busted a meat packing plant in Guangxi, China that was selling 20 tons of chicken meat slaughtered in 1967. It had been treated with hydrogen peroxide to make it look presentable in markets and stores.

TIL hummingbirds are continuously hours away from starving to death and consume the human equivalent of 140,000 calories per day to compensate. They enter an mini-hibernation mode (torpor) each night just to survive the suspension of calories.

TIL in 1971, a crazed fan shot a flare-gun towards Frank Zappa and his band during a concert in Switzerland. The resulting fire injured several audience members, melted the bands equipment, and destroyed the venue. This incident was the inspiration for Deep Purples, 'Smoke On The Water.'

TIL 35% of the deaths of Russian men under the age of 55 are linked to excessive vodka drinking. Almost 25% of Russian men die before the age of 60, compared to 10% of American men and 7% of men in the UK.

TIL in 1965, 4 CIA employees were fired because they started a “free-for-all food fight in the cafeteria.”

TIL that during WWII Audie Murphy earned every US Army combat award for valor, and several French and Belgian awards for heroism. He earned the Medal of Honor at 19 for holding off a company of German soldiers for an hour, then leading a successful counter attack while out of ammo and wounded.

TIL of the most rigged election ever (Liberian election in 1927). The winner received 243,000 votes despite the total number of registered voters was fewer than 15,000.

TIL that Washington state sends it's most dangerous sex offenders to an island in the Puget Sound accessible only by a restricted state run ferry.

TIL that when Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a Soviet sniper, was being promoted for 257 confirmed kills against the invading Germans her acceptance speech was simply "I'll get more".

TIL George Reeves, the Superman of the 50s, insisted Phyllis Coates (Lois Lane) be given equal billing.

TIL The term "bug" to describe a runtime error was popularized when in 1947 engineers discovered their program on a Harvard University Mark II computer was not working because a moth was stuck in one of the relays. They taped the bug into their engineering log book, still preserved today.

TIL Researchers at King's College London found that the drug Tideglusib stimulates the stem cells contained in the pulp of teeth so that they generate new dentine – the mineralised material under the enamel.

TIL during the first combat usage of the American Sidewinder missile in 1958, a dud hit an enemy plane and became lodged without exploding. The pilot returned to base, allowing Soviet engineers to study it and reverse-engineer a nearly identical missile for their own use.

TIL the growing German city of Wuppertal needed a railway, but had nowhere to put it. A regular monorail was deemed unsuitable, and an experimental "Floating Monorail" system was selected and constructed through the city and above the river, and remains in popular use today after over 115 years.

TIL about the Hedonic Treadmill - the tendency of a person to remain at a relatively stable level of happiness despite changes in fortune or the achievement of major goals. As a person makes more money, expectations and desires rise in tandem, which results in no permanent gain in happiness.

TIL that despite spending half his career in the saddle, Clint Eastwood is allergic to horses.

TIL when you are eating a pineapple, it is technically eating you as well. Pineapple is the only known source of Bromelain, a protein-digesting enzyme found in all parts of the fruit.

TIL that Ikea's founder, the late billionare Ingvar Kamprad, was incredibly frugal: He disciplines his employees for not using both sides of the paper. He was once turned away from Businessman Of The Year Award for arriving by bus, and assembled all his furniture himself.

TIL of physicist Lene Hau, who in 1999 led a team at Harvard University that was able to slow down a beam of light to 38mph and in 2001 they successfully stopped a beam of light.

TIL there are twice as many pubs in the UK as Starbucks in the world

TIL that during the 1946 election for sheriff in Athens, Tennessee a deputy refused to let an elderly black man vote. When the man dropped his ballot and ran, the deputy shot him in the back. This catalyst led to WWII veterans laying siege on the officers holed up in a prison.

TIL the least-visited national park in the U.S. is the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve in Alaska, which lies entirely north of the Arctic Circle and has "no established roads, trails, visitor facilities, or campgrounds."

TIL that the first female state senator elected in the United States was a Mormon polygamous wife who ran against and defeated her own husband.

TIL the first recorded battle in history was the Battle of Megiddo in 1457 BC. It left such an impression on the Levantine people there that they believed the final battle of humanity would take place there as well. That's where the word Armageddon comes from.

TIL Aloha Wanderwell was the first woman to drive around the world, befriended Chinese bandits, captured the first footage of the Bororo tribe, and disguised herself as a man to pray in Mecca.

TIL that Buddy Holly's wife, Maria Elena, did not attend his funeral and has never visited his grave site. She blames herself for his passing and said that had she gone on tour with him (she stayed home as she was pregnant), Buddy never would have gotten into that airplane.

TIL Pill bugs, AKA (Roly polies, Potato bugs, etc), are not insects, but are closely related to shrimp and other crustaceans. They also have gills.

TIL Anne Frank's family was denied asylum to the U.S. resulting in a catalyst to her death.

TIL The iconic font for "Star Wars" was derived from Helvetica Black because designer Suzy Rice thought that it was the most Fascist typeface she could think of.

TIL Amish men shave their mustaches as a protest against violence. The Amish were originally founded in Europe. At the time, mustaches were prevalent in the German military. The Amish began shaving their mustaches as a physical representation of their non-violent nature. It continues today.

TIL Movies have their own style of grocery bags that are silent for better sound recording.

TIL Harold and Kumar were written to go to Krispy Kreme, but after the company declined to be featured in the film, White Castle was selected instead. Happy about the free advertising, White Castle become the first fast food chain to have an R-Rated comedy advertised on fast food containers

TIL During negotiations for truce between North and South Korea, both parties would try to bring a bigger national flag than the other to each meeting. This continued until a special meeting was called to address the size of the flags, as they could no longer fit in the room.

TIL that Polish intelligence officer Witold Pilecki volunteered for a resistance operation to be imprisoned in Auschwitz in order to gather intelligence about the camp. He organized a resistance movement in the camp, sent information to the Allies about what was happening there, and escaped in 1943.

TIL that airplane food is heavily seasoned but your sense of taste is dulled when you're on an airplane.

TIL the present-day Washington State was originally called "Columbia", but Congress forced the name change to "Washington" in honor of George Washington and to avoid confusion with the nation's capital, the District of Columbia