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
Physics, biology and space, as taught wrongly in a hundred classrooms.
21 articles · updated August 11, 2026 · page 1 of 2
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 borders, and the borders were taught for eighty years.
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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
The Great Wall was declared visible from the Moon before anyone went there
The claim is older than spaceflight, which is the first clue. The geometry is hopeless, and what astronauts can actually pick out…
Science Myths
Your bathroom drain is far too small to notice the Earth turning
The Coriolis effect is entirely real and shapes every hurricane on the planet. It is also thousands of times too weak to beat the…
Science Myths
The far side of the Moon gets exactly as much sunlight as the near side
Dark once meant unknown, and then an album cover fixed the wrong meaning in place. There is permanent darkness on the Moon, but it…
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
Split-brain surgery was real, the creative-versus-logical personality was not
A genuinely extraordinary set of experiments on a small group of patients became a personality test sold in airports. The distance…
Science Myths
Aristotle counted five senses and nobody ever updated the list
Balance, body position and temperature are all separate sensory channels with their own receptors. The number five is a piece of…
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
Astronauts are not weightless because gravity ran out
At the height of a space station, gravity is still roughly nine tenths as strong as it is at the surface. Floating is a fact about…