TIL Canadian infantry brought over 1000 of "The Airborne Folding Bicycle" on D-Day, 1944, to travel greater distances than on foot. [source, comments]

TIL: Eating too many Sour Skittles in one sitting (or any sour candy) can make your tongue shed a layer of skin [source, comments]

TIL In 1910, Canada tried to attract settlers with its campaign "The Last Best West" to promote free land with the slogan "Living is cheap; climate is good; education and land are free.” More than two million settlers from Europe and the US poured into the prairies from 1896 to 1914 [source, comments]

TIL of the Gruen effect, a psychological phenomenon where a store's design overwhelms a person so they are more easily manipulated to buy things. It is named after architect Victor Gruen, who disapproved of the techniques [source, comments]

TIL in 2020, 68-year-old actress Ana Obregón lost her only son to cancer at 27. After his death, she used her son's frozen sperm to grant her wish of having a granddaughter (via surrogacy) who she's currently raising as her daughter. [source, comments]

TIL a Dutch hotel chef was sued by her colleagues after she baked a cannabis-infused space cake for a surprise. Several employees got violently ill from eating the cake, she was fined the equivalent of 800 dollars. [source, comments]

TIL when he was an Illinois state legislator, Abraham Lincoln was challenged to a duel by state auditor James Shields. Lincoln insisted on broadswords as the weapon rather than pistols prompting Shields to back out and call for a truce. [source, comments]

TIL: That the word embiggens and cromulent created by The Simpsons added to the US dictionary in 2018. [source, comments]

TIL that English is not the official language of the United States since it doesn’t have one, but it’s the most widely used. Some of the most widely spoken languages other than English are Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Arabic. [source, comments]

TIL The Space Shuttle was designed in the hopes that spacefaring would become cheap, reliable and everyday. Instead, maintaining the fleet took months of arduous technical work and instead of flying once a week, the shuttle made on average fewer than five flights a year [source, comments]

TIL that Isaac Hayes's, the voice of Chef from South Park, decision to leave the show was actually made by his entourage, all of whom were ardent Scientologists, and that it was made after Hayes suffered a stroke, leaving him unable to make such decisions on his own [source, comments]

TIL: The first black applicant to the then all white University of Mississippi was committed to an insane asylum for being crazy enough to apply (1958, Clennen King). [source, comments]

TIL Shaq Gave Up A $40 Million Reebok Sneaker Deal To Sell Shoes At Walmart After A Mother Approached Him Complaining About The High Price For Young Fans — Despite Criticism, He's Sold Over 400 Million Pairs - Benzinga [source, comments]

TIL that the last 'human zoo' was opened in 1994 in France. Twenty-five Ivorians, including children, had their passports confiscated and were kept for six months without pay. During that time, they were forced to work bare-chested, sleep in huts, and were treated only by veterinarians. [source, comments]

TIL About How, in the 18th Century, over 700 children were kidnapped from the streets of Aberdeen and sent to North America and sold as slaves. [source, comments]

TIL that Keith Hernandez testified before a federal grand jury in September 1985 that an estimated 40 percent of MLB players used cocaine. Even the Pittsburgh Pirates mascot, the Pirate Parrott, was implicated for buying cocaine. [source, comments]

TIL the original yellow power ranger was a guy and not a girl, but most of the fight scenes in the American version are copied the original Japanese show and that's why the yellow ranger doesn't wear a skirt and has a bulge. [source, comments]

TIL that the Great Irish Potato Famine had caused such a profound population decline in the country that it took the population 170 years to rebound. In 2021, Ireland’s population exceeded 5 million for the first time since 1851, and it has still yet to fully recover. [source, comments]

TIL that the author of the thriller The Four Just Men offered a £500 prize to whoever guessed the killer's name, but forgot to state there would only be one winner. The book became a bestseller but bankrupted him, as he was legally bound to pay every reader who answered correctly. [source, comments]

TIL that the oldest verified supercentenarian lived to 122 and regularly smoked cigarettes up until the age of 117 [source, comments]

TIL that Austrian police once locked a suspect in a basement interrogation room and forgot him there, accidentally making him the reigning world record holder for "longest survival without either food or water" (18 days). [source, comments]