Science Myths
Virgin Myth — Things everyone knows that are not so
The digest
- Your bathroom drain is far too small to notice the Earth turningScience Myths
- The far side of the Moon gets exactly as much sunlight as the near sideScience Myths
- Earth is closest to the Sun in January, which is awkward for the usual explanationScience Myths
- Split-brain surgery was real, the creative-versus-logical personality was notScience Myths
- Aristotle counted five senses and nobody ever updated the listScience Myths
- Diamonds are not squeezed coal, and most of them are older than plantsScience Myths
- Astronauts are not weightless because gravity ran outScience Myths
- Survival of the fittest was a philosopher's phrase, not Darwin'sScience Myths
Science Myths
All science myths →Science Myths
The tongue map was a graph that lost its labels
A German threshold study found small differences in sensitivity across the tongue. An American textbook redrew those differences as…
Science Myths
Old window glass is not sagging, it was made that way
Uneven medieval and Georgian panes are usually offered as proof that glass flows. The manufacturing method explains the shape, and…
Science Myths
Nobody has ever found the source of the ten per cent brain claim
The correction is straightforward and the origin is not. Every confident attribution for this one falls apart when you follow it…
Science Myths
Deoxygenated blood is dark red and your veins are an optical trick
The blue you see through the skin is a lighting effect, not a fluid. The colour-coded diagram that taught the idea was never…
History Myths
All history myths →
History Myths
Viking helmets got their horns from a costume department in 1876
No horned helmet has ever been recovered from a Viking-age grave. The design was created for an opera and adopted by the entire…
History Myths
Napoleon was an ordinary height and the confusion was in the units
The figure quoted after his death was measured in French inches, which are longer than English ones. Converted properly, he was…
History Myths
Educated Europeans knew the Earth was round the whole time
The story that Columbus argued against a flat-Earth establishment was written into a popular biography in 1828. His actual dispute…
History Myths
Marie Antoinette never said let them eat cake
The anecdote appears in a philosopher's memoir written when she was a child in another country. It was attached to her name decades…
Food Myths
All food myths →
Food Myths
Searing does not seal in juices, and the test is a set of scales
The idea came from a chemist's guess in the 1840s and was repeated in cookbooks for a century. Weighing the meat afterwards settles…
Food Myths
The alcohol does not all cook off, and the numbers are not close
Retention depends on method and time, and a splash of wine stirred through at the end keeps most of what you added. Flaming a pan…
Food Myths
Resting meat works, and the usual explanation for why is probably wrong
Juices do not travel back into the muscle fibres like water into a sponge. Something real happens during resting, and the mechanism…
Food Myths
Salt does not make water boil faster, and it slightly does the opposite
Half-remembered school chemistry produced a kitchen rule that runs backwards. The amount involved changes the boiling point by a…
Money Myths
All money myths →
Money Myths
Diamonds are not rare and the two months' salary rule was written by an agency
A single advertising campaign in the 1940s created the engagement ring convention, the slogan and the spending guideline. The…
Money Myths
Renting is not throwing money away, and neither is most of a mortgage payment
The phrase treats rent as uniquely wasted while ignoring interest, maintenance, insurance and transaction costs. Both routes have…
Money Myths
Checking your own credit file does not damage it
Two different kinds of enquiry get recorded, and only one of them belongs to a lender. Conflating them has stopped people looking…
Money Myths
Carrying a credit card balance does not build anything except interest
The belief that you must leave a balance unpaid to prove you are borrowing has no basis in how repayment behaviour is reported. It…
Language & Origins
All language & origins →
Language & Origins
Rule of thumb has nothing to do with beating anyone
The supposed legal origin comes from a satirical attack on an eighteenth-century judge who never made the ruling. The phrase itself…
Language & Origins
Posh does not stand for port out starboard home
No shipping company ticket has ever been produced bearing the initials. The story is a backronym invented to explain a slang word…
Language & Origins
Nobody knows where the whole nine yards came from, and that is the finding
Every proposed origin has failed either on dates or on arithmetic. Researchers keep pushing the earliest known use backwards, and…
Language & Origins
The snow vocabulary claim grew by repetition and has no fixed number
A brief remark in an anthropology book was inflated by each retelling until the count reached the hundreds. The linguistics makes…
Everyday Misconceptions
All everyday misconceptions →
Everyday Misconceptions
The lemmings did not jump, they were thrown by a film crew
The most famous animal behaviour in the world was staged for a nature documentary in 1958, using imported animals, a turntable and…
Everyday Misconceptions
Bulls cannot see red, and it is the cloth moving that does it
Cattle lack the receptor that would let them distinguish red from green. The colour was chosen for the audience and for the blood…
Everyday Misconceptions
Goldfish remember for months, and nobody can find who said three seconds
Fish learn routes, times and signals and retain them long after the training stops. The memory claim has no traceable source, which…
Everyday Misconceptions
Ostriches do not bury their heads, and Pliny is to blame
A Roman natural history claimed the bird believed itself hidden when its head was in a bush. What people are actually seeing is a…