Today I found out about Vasili Blokhin, the “Most Prolific Executioner” of all time, according to the Guinness World Records. Born to a Russian peasant family in 1895, as a young man he quickly earned a reputation for “chernaya rabota”, or “black work”, while serving in the Tsarist army during World War I- gaining recognition from Stalin himself for his […]
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It’s a bird! It’s a plane! Oh… it’s, a blimp… 1925 marked the year when the first Goodyear airships ascended to the skies. More than 85 years later, the iconic Goodyear blimps can still be spotted drifting through the clouds during football games, basketball tournaments, and even over the 2012 London Olympics. While today the Goodyear blimps are invariable associated […]
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Do women’s menstrual cycles sync up over time if they are in close proximity to each other? Being someone who lives with 4 girls and 1 other boy, this knowledge would be very beneficial. I feel like I should know if the estrogen ocean I’m swimming in will have very stormy seas every 28 days. The belief that this occurs […]
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In 1964, a new avant-garde artist was introduced to the art scene in the Swedish city of Gōteborg. The fresh new artist was Pierre Brassau and his work received rave reviews from critics and art fans alike. Brassau featured four paintings in the 1964 exhibition at Gallerie Christinae, and even sold one “masterpiece” to a collector named Bertil Eklöt for […]
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Today I found out that for something that’s supposed to be clean and pure, soap has a murky past. No one knows for sure when soap was first invented, although it appears to have been around since the dawn of civilization. One of the reasons it’s so hard to pin down soap’s first appearance is that it can be made […]
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Perhaps one of the most iconic images to come out of the Vietnam War (see photo here), this photo depicts a uniformed South Vietnamese officer shooting a prisoner in the head. When you look into it, however, there is much more to this photograph than first meets the eye. There is an undeniable brutality to this photo, but even Eddie […]
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“The war began in my front yard and ended in my parlor.” This statement about the start and the end of the U.S. Civil War was spoken by Wilmer McLean and is surprisingly almost perfectly true. A little background- Wilmer McLean was born on May 3, 1814 in Alexandria, Virginia, one of fourteen children. When his parents passed away at […]
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It’s difficult to imagine that the chocolate chip cookie, one of the world’s most beloved sweet treats, was actually invented by accident. The invention of the chocolate chip cookie happened in 1930 when Ruth Graves Wakefield and her husband, Kenneth, were running the Toll House Inn on Route 18 near Whitman, Massachusetts. Mrs. Wakefield, a dietician and food lecturer, prepared […]
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Even if you don’t recognize the name, odds are you’ve at least heard the Wilhelm Scream (listen to it here). It’s that classic scream that movie goers around the world remember and is sometimes also called the “Star Wars Scream”. You hear it when Luke Skywalker shoots that Stormtrooper on the Death Star, when Indiana Jones takes down that Nazi, […]
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“Don’t swallow your gum! It’ll take seven years to digest it!” If you chew gum, chances are you’ve been told that it’s dangerous to swallow it. You’ve probably even heard horror stories about giant wads of chewing gum hanging around in your gut for as many as seven years. Where this bit of folk wisdom originated is unclear, but the […]
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Today I found out why mustard is yellow. A common misconception is that yellow mustard (the kind you put on your hot dog) is yellow because of the mustard seed. This is not true. The mustard seed is a dullish gray, brown color. The striking, bold yellow color actually comes from the rootstock of a plant called turmeric. Turmeric, native […]
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Today I found out that both Häagen-Dazs and Frusen Glädjé are American companies, something that may come as a shock to the many people who assumed – and presumably still assume in some cases – that the two brands were not as “American as apple pie”, and more likely to be of Scandinavian heritage. But no, the Scandinavian vibe surrounding the two […]
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Today I found out how shrunken heads were made. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, a shrunken head is a decapitated human head that is shrunk through a cooking process by members of the Jivaroan tribes of the northwestern region of the Amazon rain forest in Ecuador and Peru. Why do this? Tribal members believed in the […]
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I recently put out a job listing for some new writers to add to the team here on Today I Found Out. I received well over 300 applicants, with a shockingly high percentage of them being amazingly good. After going through all the applications a few times, I managed to narrow the list down to the top 10% and gave […]
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The woman was Huang Yijun from China. When she was 31 in 1948, she became pregnant only to find out that she had an ectopic pregnancy, meaning the egg had not attached in the uterus. In most ectopic pregnancies, the egg will implant in the Fallopian tubes, but in Huang’s case, the egg implanted just outside her Fallopian tubes causing […]
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Today I found out why sideburns are named as they are. It turns out, despite this particular brand of facial hair style being around as far back as at least 100 BC (with one of the earliest known instances being in a mosaic of Alexander the Great), sideburns were named after a specific man in the late 19th century. The […]
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Paul Glee Waner played baseball in the big leagues for 20 seasons, from 1926 to 1945. They called him “Big Poison” despite Waner being a small man at 5 ft. 8 1/2 in. in height and never weighing more than 153 pounds. Despite his somewhat diminutive stature and the fact that he thought that he played better slightly drunk or […]
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Myth: Cracking your knuckles throughout your lifetime will eventually cause you to have arthritis. Have you ever cracked your knuckles and had someone yell at you to stop because it causes arthritis? 25-54% of the world’s population cracks their knuckles, men more so than women. Does this mean up to 54% of us will get arthritis? The short answer is […]
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