Believe it or not, even before fake news became a thing, we've had a lot of misinformation given to us in our lifetime. Some are urban legends and myths, some are things that better technology have helped prove (or disprove). In any event, you've probably heard these 10 common facts growing up, but they're all false - or at least, they're missing some key truths.
False.
If you were taught that carrots help your night vision, then congratulations! You're part of the fallout from propaganda started by the British government that dates all the way back to WWII. In those days, radar had JUST been invented, and the British were trying to conceal this new technology from the Nazis. What better way to conceal a technology than to create a legend around John Cunningham, an RAF pilot dubbed "Cat's Eyes", who got his ability to see enemies in the dark from his favourite vegetable?
Nope. Or at least, they're not the 9 you think.
Officially, we've been downgraded to 8, now that Pluto has been kicked off the list. Pluto has been officially downgraded to a dwarf planet, since it's smaller than our moon. But if it makes you feel any better, you might be happy to know there's at least 5 dwarf planets in our solar system that your science class may not have taught you about - Ceres, Pluto, Eris, Makemake and Haumea - and possibly even dozens more yet to be discovered.
Some scientists still believe there's a true 9th planet still out there, even farther out than Pluto, based on fluctuations in the orbit of comets and other bodies that go through the Kuiper belt. But we haven't found it yet, much less seen it.
False. There's no such thing as blue blood. Diagrams like this have probably been exacerbated a bit by the illusion of blueish veins showing through our skin, and not altered because two tones are still convenient for demonstrating circulatory flow.
Why do the veins look blue then? Our subcutaneous fat deposits below the skin are yellowish, and absorb a lot of the other wavelengths of light. Even without oxygen in it, all of your blood is definitely red.
False. Napoleon was almost 5'7" (1.68m) when he died. While this still may seem a bit on the small side by today's standards (although nowhere near as short as many fictional portrayals show him), the average height for a man at the time was actually around 5'5". The "short man" myth might have been aided by the fact that his personal guard was made up of people who were giant by the standards of the day.
Nope, the gods aren't crying. Most rain drops of average size fall in the shape of a hamburger bun.
False. The three true primary colours that make up all the other colours are not what you think they are: in fact, there's two different sets of primary colours, depending on whether you're talking about colours created by emitted light, like a projector, or colours that come from refracted light, like a painting.
Everyone who's ever used a television already knows the emitted light ("additive") RGB palatte (Red, Green, and Blue). The "subtractive" primaries are CMY (Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow). Yes, you can make red from yellow and magenta and blue from cyan and magenta. Your ink cartridge has it right - and so did colour theorists dating all the way back to the 19th century.
Why our school system still teaches that red, yellow and blue are the three colours that make up everything? We have no idea.
Misleading - and this is a great example about how you can use statistics to show anything.
Assuming you grew up to adulthood, weren't a child-bearing female, and didn't join up in a war, the odds of living to your 50s and 60s were pretty good. Some people lived to their 70s and 80s. The trick was surviving being a child - the chances a child or infant would die were somewhere between 25-40%.
In fact, most historians believe that for 2000 years, maximum life span has stayed just about the same as long as you managed to grow up; the only thing that is different is that child and infant mortality numbers skewed the "average" lifespan numbers significantly for centuries, and the mortality rate for infants and children is decreasing.
Ferdinand Magellan, the famed Portuguese explorer given credit for going all the way around the globe and thus proving it was round, actually got himself killed in the Philippines while trying to convert the locals to Christianity by force. He didn't even make it to the spice islands. Historians suspect that the first person to actually have circumnavigated the globe was Magellan's slave, Enrique, who came from the East Indies and may have originated from near the Philippines. But barring surety of where Enrique was from, officially the credit is due at least partially to Juan Sebastian Elcano, the man who took over command of the expedition after Magellan died in the Pacific.
And on this note, Christopher Columbus was a pretty evil guy too, a fact fairly glossed over in our school history books. Columbus has a lot of blood on his hands, including forcing religious conversion and enslaving thousands of the indigenous.
Well, they do when documentary filmmakers stage a misunderstood behavioural pattern that they couldn't get the lemmings to perform otherwise. Like a lot of animals, lemmings will disperse when they've exhausted their available food supply and look for food elsewhere.
Sometimes animals who are looking for food will try to swim across bodies of water and drown.
No. Yes, it does appear to be true that certain regions of the brain seem to control various things that we do. However, specializing in certain traits does not mean you don't use your whole brain at all times, and it doesn't make one side or the other "dominant." Both sides are well connected, and we have evolved with them working together.
Besides, split-brain research suggests that we might have those hemisphere "specialties" all backwards anyway - the right hemisphere is actually more literal, and the left more responsible for interpretive and inventive thinking.
Anne is one of those people who usually speaks to others in memes, pop culture references, and SAT words. On those occasions she can be understood at all, she likes to entertain others with a sense of humour usually described by friends as “hilarious—once you get to know her.”
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