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…
Anjali Sundaram
Editor, Virgin Myth
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51 articles
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…
Science Myths
Earth is closest to the Sun in January, which is awkward for the usual explanation
Most people arrive at distance because it is the obvious guess, and the classroom diagram encourages it. The two hemispheres…
Science Myths
Diamonds are not squeezed coal, and most of them are older than plants
The schoolroom version pairs two forms of carbon and adds pressure. The geology puts them in different places, made from different…
Science Myths
Survival of the fittest was a philosopher's phrase, not Darwin's
The slogan arrived from outside biology and was adopted years later. The ladder-shaped diagram that came with it did more damage…
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…
History Myths
The nine million witches figure came from one man's bad arithmetic
A late eighteenth-century writer extrapolated from a small local sample to the whole of Europe across several centuries. Every part…
History Myths
Nobody knows which way the thumb pointed in a Roman arena
The famous downward gesture comes from a nineteenth-century painting. The Latin phrase behind it describes a turned thumb without…
History Myths
Paul Revere did not shout that the British were coming
The ride was real, deliberately quiet, and shared with other riders. The famous version was written as a poem eighty-five years…
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…
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…
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…
Language & Origins
The preposition rule was one writer's opinion in 1672
A poet criticising a rival introduced the objection, again by analogy with Latin. The most famous joke about it was attributed to…
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…
Everyday Misconceptions
Dogs see blue and yellow, and one 1930s manual said otherwise
The claim that dogs see only in grey appears to trace to a popular dog-care book, not to any experiment. Their eyes carry two…
Food Myths
The fortune cookie is Japanese, and the paperwork survives
Similar cookies with paper fortunes were being made near Kyoto before they appeared in America. The switch to Chinese restaurants…
Money Myths
Black Friday was named by traffic police, not by accountants
The term described the chaos in one American city on the day after Thanksgiving. The story about retailers moving into profit was a…
Money Myths
The story about prices ending in nine is itself a myth
Everyone knows the ninety-nine ending was invented to force cashiers to open the till. Almost nobody can produce evidence for it…
Money Myths
Money and happiness have a messier relationship than either slogan admits
One influential analysis found the effect flattening above a threshold. A later one using different methods found no flattening.…
Language & Origins
Thomas Crapper was real, and the word is older than he is
He was a genuine sanitary engineer with genuine patents, but he did not invent the flush toilet and the rude word predates him by…
Language & Origins
Ye Olde was always pronounced the, and the culprit is a missing letter
Early English had a letter for the th sound. Printers importing type from the continent had no such letter and substituted the…
Language & Origins
OK began as a joke about deliberately bad spelling
A newspaper fad for comic abbreviations produced it in 1839, and a presidential campaign nickname the following year gave it the…
Language & Origins
That email about life in the 1500s invented every etymology in it
A chain message circulating in the late 1990s supplied vivid origins for a dozen common phrases. Not one of them survives checking…
Language & Origins
The moth in the logbook was a joke about a word already in use
The insect taped into a 1947 logbook is real and preserved. The note beside it calls it the first actual case of a bug, which only…
Everyday Misconceptions
Bats can see, and an eighteenth-century experiment made things worse
Every bat has functional eyes, and many rely on them heavily. A brilliant set of experiments in the 1790s showed blinded bats…
Everyday Misconceptions
A bird will not reject a chick because you touched it
Most birds have a modest sense of smell and no way to detect a human on their offspring. The instruction is still good, which is…
Everyday Misconceptions
The car protects you from lightning, and the tyres have nothing to do with it
A bolt that has crossed several kilometres of air is not going to be stopped by a centimetre of rubber. It is the metal shell that…
Everyday Misconceptions
Microwaves do not cook from the inside out
They penetrate only a centimetre or two and heat the outer layer, which then conducts inwards. The middle is usually the last part…
Everyday Misconceptions
The Bermuda Triangle was invented in a magazine in 1964
A writer grouped some unconnected losses under a memorable name. A researcher later went back to the original records and found the…
Everyday Misconceptions
The five-second rule is a question about surfaces, not about seconds
Transfer begins on contact and keeps going, so time matters less than what the floor is made of and how wet the food is. Treat this…
Science Myths
Galileo probably never dropped anything off the tower, and did not need to
The Pisa demonstration appears only in a biography written by a devoted assistant decades later. The physics is secure, the famous…
History Myths
The Library of Alexandria did not burn down in an afternoon
At least four different destructions are blamed on four different culprits across six centuries. The likelier story is a long…
Food Myths
Whether hot water freezes faster is still not properly settled
The claim goes back to antiquity and was revived by a schoolboy's classroom question in the 1960s. Careful attempts to reproduce it…
Money Myths
Ford did not double wages so workers could buy the cars
The famous pay rise was announced in 1914, and the explanation everyone repeats came afterwards. The assembly line was losing…
Money Myths
A penny saved is a penny earned is not what Franklin wrote
The almanac everyone credits contains a different and better line. The familiar version was in circulation in English before he was…
Money Myths
Sell in May comes from a horse race, and the evidence is thinner than the slogan
The saying is a piece of old City of London folklore about when to leave town. Studies have found seasonal patterns in returns, and…
Language & Origins
Literally has meant figuratively for centuries, and the complaint is newer
The intensifying use appears in respected authors long before anyone objected to it. The dispute is a good case of a change being…
Language & Origins
Gringo does not come from green go home, and the dates rule it out
The backronym involves soldiers, uniforms and a chant, and it appears in several incompatible versions. The word was in Spanish…
Language & Origins
The exception that proves the rule is a legal maxim, not a word game
The popular fix says that prove once meant test. The better-supported explanation is that a stated exception implies a rule…
Everyday Misconceptions
Lightning strikes the same place constantly, and the saying was never about weather
The proverb began as a remark about misfortune not repeating itself. Tall structures are hit dozens of times a year, and some of…
Everyday Misconceptions
You do not swallow spiders in your sleep, and the debunk is also made up
The claim about spiders eaten each year is famously said to have been invented to prove that people believe anything. Nobody has…
Everyday Misconceptions
Daddy longlegs is three different animals and none of them fits the story
The claim that the most venomous spider in the world cannot bite you is repeated in every playground. The name covers three…
Everyday Misconceptions
No petrol station fire has ever been traced to a mobile phone
The warning signs went up in the 1990s and the chain emails followed. Investigations of forecourt flash fires keep finding the same…
Everyday Misconceptions
Warming up the engine was necessary once, and the reason disappeared
Idling before driving made sense when a mechanical carburettor had to be coaxed into delivering a workable mixture. Fuel injection…
Everyday Misconceptions
The claim that bees should not be able to fly came from a dinner-table sum
The calculation was rough, was made in the 1930s using fixed-wing assumptions, and was never intended as a serious result. The…
Everyday Misconceptions
Toast really does land butter side down, and the reason is the table
This one is usually filed as a joke about pessimism and selective memory. Testing found a genuine physical reason, and it depends…