Each entry on this list of common misconceptions is worded as a correction; the misconceptions themselves are implied rather than stated. These entries are concise summaries of the main subject articles, which can be consulted for more detail.
Legal tender laws in the United States do not state that a private business, a person, or an organization must accept cash for payment, though it must be regarded as valid payment for debts when tendered to a creditor.[1]
The common image of Santa Claus (Father Christmas) as a jolly old man in red robes was not created by The Coca-Cola Company as an advertising gimmick. Santa Claus had already taken this form in American popular culture and advertising by the late 19th century, long before Coca-Cola used his image in the 1930s.[5]
The Chevrolet Nova sold very well in Latin American markets; General Motors did not need to rename the car. While no va does mean "it doesn't go" in Spanish, nova was easily understood to mean "new".[6]
Netflix was not founded after its co-founder Reed Hastings was charged a $40 late fee by Blockbuster. Hastings made the story up to summarize Netflix's value proposition, and Netflix's founders were actually inspired by Amazon.[7][8][9][10]
At no point in time did PepsiCo own the "6th most powerful navy" (or military) in the world after a deal with the Soviet Union. The deal proposed in 1990, in which US$3 billion worth of Pepsi would be traded for 20 decommissioned Soviet warships to be sold for scrap, ultimately did not take place due to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and would have only granted PepsiCo "small, old, obsolete, unseaworthy vessels."[11][12]
Food and cooking
Searing does not seal moisture in meat; in fact, it causes it to lose some moisture. Meat is seared to brown it, improving its color, flavor, and texture.[13]
Twinkies, an American snack cake generally considered as "junk food", have a shelf life of around 45 days, despite the common claim (usually facetious) that they remain edible for decades.[14][15] Twinkies, with only sorbic acid as an added preservative, normally remain on a store shelf for 7 to 10 days.[16][17]
There are no known cases of children having been killed or seriously injured by poisoned candy or fruit given to them by strangers at Halloween or any other time, though there are cases where people have poisoned their own children.[18]
With the exception of some perishables, properly stored foods can safely be eaten past their "expiration" dates.[19][20] The vast majority of expiration dates in the United States are regulated by state governments and refer to food quality, not safety; the "Use by" date represents the last day the manufacturer warrants the quality of their product.
Seeds are not the spicy part of chili peppers. In fact, seeds contain a low amount of capsaicin, one of several compounds which induce the hot sensation (pungency) in mammals. The highest concentration of capsaicin is located in the placental tissue (the pith) to which the seeds are attached.[21]
Turkey meat is not particularly high in tryptophan, and does not cause more drowsiness than other foods.[22] Drowsiness after holiday meals such as Thanksgiving dinner generally comes from the body's metabolism: high protein in the turkey provokes the body to shift its energy consumption to digesting the protein, while the carbohydrates in the side dishes and desserts trigger a "sugar crash" (reactive hypoglycemia).[23]
Rice does not cause birds to die by inflating their stomachs until they burst. Birds do eat wild rice, though some species avoid it. This common misconception has often led to weddings using millet, confetti, or other materials to shower the newlyweds as they leave the ceremony, instead of traditionally throwing rice.[24][25]
Hydrox is not a knock-off of Oreos. Hydrox, invented in 1908, predates Oreos by four years and actually outsold it for the first couple of decades. Oreos did not start outselling it until the 1950s as a result of better pricing and the name "Hydrox" becoming increasingly unappealing due to sounding like a laundry detergent brand.[30][31][32]
Potato chips were not invented by a frustrated George Speck in response to a customer, sometimes given as Cornelius Vanderbilt, complaining that his French fries were too thick and not salty enough.[37][38][39] Recipes for potato chips existed in cookbooks as early as 1817.[39][40] The misconception was popularized by a 1973 advertising campaign by the St. Regis Paper Company.[41]
Spices were not used in the Middle Ages to mask the flavor of rotting meat before refrigeration. Spices were an expensive luxury item; those who could afford them could afford good meat, and there are no contemporaneous documents calling for spices to disguise the taste of bad meat.[42]
Steak tartare was not invented by Mongol warriors who tenderized meat under their saddles.[43] The dish originated in the early 20th century, in Europe, as a variation on the German-American Hamburg steak.[44][45]
Whipped cream was not invented by François Vatel at the Château de Chantilly in 1671; the recipe is attested at least a century earlier in Italy, but the name crème chantilly only in the 19th century.[46]
Microwave ovens are not tuned to any specific resonance frequency for water molecules in the food, but rather produce a broad spectrum of frequencies,[48][49][50] cooking food via dielectric heating of polar molecules, including water. Several absorption peaks for water lie within the microwave range, and while it is true that these peaks are caused by quantization of molecular energy levels corresponding to a single frequency,[51] water absorbs radiation across the entire microwave spectrum.
Microwave ovens do not cook food from the inside out. 2.45 GHz microwaves can only penetrate approximately 1 centimeter (3⁄8 inch) into most foods. The inside portions of thicker foods are mainly heated by heat conducted from the outer portions.[52]
Microwave ovens do not cause cancer, as microwave radiation is non-ionizing and therefore does not have the cancer risks associated with ionizing radiation such as X-rays. No studies have found that microwave radiation causes cancer, even with exposure levels far greater than normal radiation leakage.[53]
Microwaving food does not reduce its nutritive value and may preserve it better than other cooking processes due to shorter cooking times.[54]
Film and television
Ronald Reagan was never seriously considered for the role of Rick Blaine in the 1942 film classic Casablanca, eventually played by Humphrey Bogart. This belief came from an early studio press release announcing the film's production that used his name to generate interest in the film, but, by the time it had come out, Warner Bros. knew that Reagan was unavailable for any roles in the foreseeable future since he was no longer able to defer his entry into military service.[55] Studio records show that producer Hal B. Wallis had always wanted Bogart for the part.[56]
Although it is considered the first modern zombie film, George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead did not identify the undead as zombies. Instead they were referred to as "ghouls". The undead in the film and the subsequent film series also have little in common with the zombies from Haitian mythology, who were corpses reanimated by sorcerers to act as their personal slaves.[57][58][59] Romero said the ghouls were inspired by the vampires from I Am Legend,[60] and that at the time he still associated the word "zombie" with the beings from the 1932 film White Zombie,[61] who were closer to their Haitian depictions.[62] The former misconception comes from confusion with its 1978 sequel Dawn of the Dead, where the undead were explicitly called "zombies".[59]
Sign languages are not the same worldwide. Aside from the pidginInternational Sign, each country generally has its own native sign language, and some have more than one.[69]
Eskimo tribes, such as the Inuit and Aleut, do not have a disproportionate number of words representing snow in their languages. The myth comes from a misconstruction of Franz Boas's original statement noting that Eskimos had a variety of words for various snow-related concepts; Boas noted that the same was true to a lesser extent for English (see, for example, "blizzard," "flurry" and "squall").[70] However, Eskimo languages do have many more root words for "snow" than does English.[71][72]
The Chinese word for "crisis" (危机) is not composed of the symbols for "danger" and "opportunity"; the first does represent danger, but the second instead means "inflection point" (the original meaning of the word "crisis").[74] The myth was perpetuated mainly by a campaign speech from John F. Kennedy.[75]
"Irregardless" is a word.[80][81]Nonstandard, slang, or colloquial terms used by English speakers are sometimes alleged not to be real words, despite appearing in numerous dictionaries. All words in English became accepted by being commonly used for a certain period of time; thus, there are many vernacular words currently not accepted as part of the standard language, or regarded as inappropriate in formal speech or writing, but the idea that they are somehow not words is a misconception.[82] Other examples of words that are sometimes alleged not to be words include "burglarize", "licit",[83] and "funnest"[84] which appear in numerous dictionaries as English words.[85]
The word "crap" did not originate as a back-formation of British plumber Thomas Crapper's aptronymous surname, nor does his name originate from the word "crap".[89] The surname "Crapper" is a variant of "Cropper", which originally referred to someone who harvested crops.[90] The word "crap" ultimately comes from Medieval Latincrappa.[91]
The word "fuck" did not originate in the Middle Ages as an acronym for either "fornicating under consent of king" or "for unlawful carnal knowledge", either as a sign posted above adulterers in the stocks, or as a sign on houses visible from the road during the Black Plague. Nor did it originate as a corruption of "pluck yew" (an idiom falsely attributed to the English for drawing a longbow).[92] It is most likely derived from Middle Dutch or other Germanic languages, where it either meant "to thrust" or "to copulate with" (fokken in Middle Dutch), "to copulate" (fukka in Norwegian), or "to strike, push, copulate" or "penis" (focka and fock respectively in Swedish).[92][93] Either way, these variations would have been derived from the Indo-European root word -peuk, meaning "to prick".[92]
The expression "rule of thumb" did not originate from an English law allowing a man to beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb, and there is no evidence that such a law ever existed.[94] The false etymology has been broadly reported in media including The Washington Post (1989), CNN (1993), and Time magazine (1983).[95] The expression originates from the seventeenth century from various trades where quantities were measured by comparison to the width or length of a thumb.[96][97]
The word "the" was never pronounced or spelled "ye" in Old or Middle English.[98] The confusion, seen in the common stock phrase "ye olde", derives from the use of the character thorn (þ), which in Middle English represented the sound now represented in Modern English by "th". In blackletter, þ and y were difficult to distinguish, meaning that "þͤ" () and "þe" very closely resembled "yͤ" and "ye", respectively.[99]
The anti-Italian slur wop did not originate from an acronym for "without papers" or "without passport";[100] it is actually derived from the term guappo (roughly meaning thug or "dandy"), from Spanish guapo.[101]
"Xmas", along with a modern Santa Claus, used on a Christmas postcard (1910) "Xmas" did not originate as a secular plan to "take the Christ out of Christmas".[102]X represents the Greek letter chi, the first letter of Χριστός (Christós), "Christ" in Greek,[103] as found in the chi-rho symbol ΧΡ since the 4th century. In English, "X" was first used as a scribal abbreviation for "Christ" in 1100; "X'temmas" is attested in 1551, and "Xmas" in 1721.[104]
Law, crime, and military
It is rarely necessary to wait 24 hours before filing a missing person report. When there is evidence of violence or of an unusual absence, it is important to start an investigation promptly.[105] The UK government advises "You do not have to wait 24 hours before contacting the police."[106]Criminology experts say the first 72 hours in a missing person investigation are the most critical.[107]
The US Armed Forces have generally forbidden military enlistment as a form of deferred adjudication (that is, an option for convicts to avoid jail time) since the 1980s. US Navy protocols discourage the practice, while the other four branches have specific regulations against it.[109]
The United States does not require police officers to identify themselves as police in the case of a sting or other undercover work, and police officers may lie when engaged in such work.[110] Claiming entrapment as a defense instead focuses on whether the defendant was induced by undue pressure (such as threats) or deception from law enforcement to commit crimes they would not have otherwise committed.[111]
Violent crime rates in the United States declined significantly between 1994 and 2003Crime in the United States decreased between 1993 and 2017. The violent crime rate fell 49% in that period,[112] and the number of gun homicides had decreased during that same time period.[113]
Neither the Mafia nor other criminal organizations regularly use or have used cement shoes to drown their victims.[118] There are only two documented cases of this method being used in murders: one in 1964 and one in 2016 (although, in the former, the victim had concrete blocks tied to his legs rather than being enclosed in cement).[119] The French Army did use cement shoes on Algerians killed in death flights during the Algerian War.[120]
In the United States, a defendant may not have their case dismissed simply because they were not read their Miranda rights at the time of their arrest. Miranda warnings cover the rights of a person when they are taken into custody and then interrogated by law enforcement.[121][122] If a person is not given a Miranda warning before the interrogation is conducted, statements made by them during the interrogation may not be admissible in a trial. The prosecution may still present other forms of evidence, or statements made during interrogations where the defendant was read their Miranda rights, to get a conviction.[123]
Chewing gum is not punishable by caning in Singapore. Although importing and selling chewing gum has been illegal in Singapore since 1992, and corporal punishment still being an applicable penalty for certain offenses in the country, the two facts are unrelated; chewing gum-related offenses have always been only subject to fines, and the possession or consumption of chewing gum itself is not illegal.[124]
Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein is named after the scientist Victor Frankenstein, who created the sapient creature in the novel, not the creature itself, which is never named and is called Frankenstein's monster. However, as later adaptations started to refer to the monster itself as Frankenstein, this usage became well-established, and some no longer regard it as erroneous.[126][127]
Listening to Mozart or classical music does not enhance intelligence (or IQ). A study from 1993 reported a short-term improvement in spatial reasoning,[136][137] however the weight of subsequent evidence supports either a null effect or short-term effects related to increases in mood and arousal, with mixed results published after the initial report in Nature.[138][139][140][141]
The "Minute Waltz" takes, on average, two minutes to play as originally written.[142] Its name comes from the adjective minute, meaning "small", and not the noun spelled the same.[143]
The Rolling Stones were not performing "Sympathy for the Devil" at the 1969 Altamont Free Concert when Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death by a member of the local Hells Angels chapter that was serving as security. While the incident began while the band was performing the song, prompting a brief interruption before the Stones finished it, the actual stabbing occurred later as the band was performing "Under My Thumb".[149] The misconception arose from mistaken reporting in Rolling Stone.[150]
Concept albums did not begin with rock music in the 1960s. The format had already been employed by singers such as Frank Sinatra in the 1940s and 1950s.[151]
Phil Collins did not write his 1981 hit "In the Air Tonight" about witnessing someone drowning and then confronting the person in the audience who let it happen. According to Collins himself, it was about his emotions when divorcing from his first wife.[152]
Religion
Buddhism
The historical Buddha is not known to have been fat. The chubby monk known as the "fat Buddha" or "laughing Buddha" in the West is a 10th-century Chinese Buddhist folk hero by the name of Budai.[153]
Christianity
Jesuswas most likely not born on any date corresponding to December 25, the date on which his birth is traditionally celebrated as Christmas. It is more likely that his birth was in either the season of spring or perhaps summer, while December 25 in the Northern Hemisphere is at the beginning of winter. Also, although the Common Era ostensibly counts the years since his birth,[154] it is unlikely that he was born in either AD 1 or 1 BC, as such a numbering system would imply. Modern historians estimate a date closer to between 6 BC and 4 BC.[155]
The Bible does not say that exactly three magi came to visit the baby Jesus, nor that they were kings, or rode on camels, or that their names were Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar, nor what color their skin was. Three magi are inferred because three gifts are described, but the Bible says only that there was more than one magus;[156] still, artistic depictions of the nativity have almost always depicted three magi since the 3rd century.[157] Though they are often depicted as being present for Jesus' birth, the Bible specifies only an upper limit of two years for the interval between the birth and the visit (Matthew 2:16),[158] The association of magi with kings—a connection vehemently opposed by John Calvin as a "ridiculous contrivance"[159]—comes from attempts to tie Old Testament prophecies such as Psalm 72 and chapter 60 of the Book of Isaiah, to the magi; most accounts describe the magi as being astrologers or magicians.[160][161]
No Biblical or historical evidence supports Mary Magdalene having been a prostitute.[162] The idea that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute before she met Jesus is not found in the Bible or in any of the other earliest Christian writings. The misconception likely arose due to a conflation between Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany (who anoints Jesus's feet in John 11:1–12), and the unnamed "sinful woman" who anoints Jesus's feet in Luke 7:36–50.[162]
Paul the Apostle did not change his name from Saul. He was born a Jew, with Roman citizenship inherited from his father, and thus carried both a Hebrew and a Greco-Roman name from birth, as mentioned by Luke in Acts 13:9: "...Saul, who also is called Paul...".[163]
Roman Catholic dogma does not say that the pope is either sinless or always infallible.[166] Catholic dogma since 1870 does state that a dogmatic teaching contained in divine revelation that is promulgated by the pope (deliberately, and under certain very specific circumstances; generally called ex cathedra) is free from error, although official invocation of papal infallibility is rare. While most theologians state that canonizations meet the requisites,[167] aside from that, most recent popes have finished their reign without a single invocation of infallibility. Otherwise, even when speaking in his official capacity, dogma does not hold that he is free from error.
St. Peter's Basilica is not the mother church of Roman Catholicism, nor is it the official seat of the Pope.[168] These equivalent distinctions belong to the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran, which is located in Rome outside of Vatican City but over which the Vatican has extraterritorial jurisdiction.[168] This also means that St. Peter's is not a cathedral in the literal sense of that word.[168] St. Peter's is, however, used as the principal church for many papal functions.[168]
Saint Augustine did not say "God created hell for inquisitive people".[173] He actually said: "I do not give the answer that someone is said to have given (evading by a joke the force of the objection), 'He was preparing hell for those who pry into such deep subjects.' ... I do not answer in this way. I would rather respond, 'I do not know,' concerning what I do not know than say something for which a man inquiring about such profound matters is laughed at, while the one giving a false answer is praised."[174] So Augustine is saying that he would not say this and that he does not know the answer to the question.
The First Council of Nicaea did not establish the books of the Bible. The Old Testament had likely already been established by Hebrew scribes before Christ. The development of the New Testament canon was mostly completed in the third century before the Nicaea Council was convened in 325;[175] it was finalized, along with the deuterocanon, at the Council of Rome in 382.[176]
Most Muslim women do not wear a burqa (also transliterated as burka or burkha), which covers the body, head, and face, with a mesh grille to see through. Many Muslim women cover their hair and face (excluding the eyes) with a niqāb, or just their hair with a hijab.[177] However, there are also Muslim women who wear neither face nor head coverings of any kind.[178]
A fatwa is a non-binding legal opinion issued by an Islamic scholar under Islamic law; it is therefore commonplace for fatwā from different authors to disagree. The misconception[179] that it is a death sentence stems from a fatwā issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran in 1989 where he said that the author Salman Rushdie had earned a death sentence for blasphemy.[180]
The word "jihad" does not always mean "holy war"; literally, the word in Arabic means "struggle". While there is such a thing as "jihad bil saif", or jihad "by the sword",[181] many modern Islamic scholars usually say that it implies an effort or struggle of a spiritual kind.[182] Scholar Louay Safi asserts that "misconceptions and misunderstandings regarding the nature of war and peace in Islam are widespread in both the Muslim societies and the West", as much following 9/11 as before.[183]
The Quran does not promise martyrs 72 virgins in heaven. It does mention virgin female companions,[184][185]houri, to all people—martyr or not—in heaven, but no number is specified. The source for the 72 virgins is a hadith in Sunan al-Tirmidhi by Imam Tirmidhi.[186][187] Hadiths are sayings and acts of the prophet Muhammad as reported by others, and as such they are not part of the Quran itself. Muslims are not meant to necessarily believe all hadiths, and that applies particularly to those hadiths that are weakly sourced, such as this one.[188] Furthermore, the correct translation of this particular hadith is a matter of debate.[186]
Judaism
Often shown as an apple in art, the fruit in the Garden of Eden is not named in Genesis.[189] The forbidden fruit mentioned in the Book of Genesis is never identified as an apple,[189] as widely depicted in Western art. The original Hebrew texts mention only tree and fruit. Early Latin translations use the word mali, which can mean either "of evil" or "of apple". In early Germanic languages the word apple and its cognates usually simply meant "fruit". Jewish scholars have suggested that the fruit could have been wheat, a grape, a fig, or an etrog.[190]
The name "golf" is not an acronym for "Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden".[192][193][194] It may have come from the Dutch word kolf or kolve, meaning "club",[193] or from the Scottish word goulf or gowf meaning "to strike or cuff".[192]
Marcos Torregrosa wearing the BJJ black belt with a red bar indicating first degree The black belt in martial arts does not necessarily indicate expert level or mastery. It was introduced for judo in the 1880s to indicate competency at all of the basic techniques of the sport. Promotion beyond 1st dan (the first black belt rank) varies among different martial arts. In judo and derived martial arts such as Brazilian jiu-jitsu, holders of higher master ranks are awarded alternating red and white panels, and the highest grandmasters wear solid red belts.[196] Some other arts such as taekwondo use black belts with a number of gold bars to indicate the holder's dan rank.
The use of triangular corner flags in English football is not a privilege reserved for those teams that have won an FA Cup in the past[197] as depicted in a scene in the film Twin Town. The Football Association's rules are silent on the subject, and often the decision over what shape flag to use has been up to the individual club's groundskeepers.[198]
India did not withdraw from the 1950 FIFA World Cup because their squad played barefoot, which was against FIFA regulations.[199] In reality, India withdrew because the country's managing body, the All India Football Federation (AIFF), was insufficiently prepared for the team's participation and gave various reasons for withdrawing, including a lack of funding and prioritizing the Olympics.[200][201] The AIFF itself may have been the source of this myth.[202]
Video games
There is no evidence that violent video games cause people to become violent. Studies have consistently found no link between aggression and violent video games,[203][204] and the popularity of gaming has coincided with a decrease in youth violence.[205][206] The moral panic surrounding video games in the 1980s through to the 2000s, alongside isolated incidents of violence and legislation in many countries, likely contributed to proliferating this idea.[207]
The so-called "Nuclear Gandhi" glitch, in which peaceful leader Mahatma Gandhi would become unusually aggressive if democracy was adopted because it caused an integer underflow,[208] did not exist in either the original Civilization game or Civilization II. Game designer Sid Meier said it was not possible because both games were programmed in C and C++, which did not produce overflows due to the integers being signed by default. He attributed the origins of the rumor to both a TV Tropes thread and a Know Your Meme entry,[209] while Reddit and a Kotaku article helped popularize it.[210] Gandhi's supposed behavior would later be intentionally added to Civilization V[209] and VI[211] as a reference to the rumor.
The Japanese government did not pass a law banning Square Enix from releasing the Dragon Quest games on weekdays due to it causing too many schoolchildren to cut class. The only extent of the government's involvement was that the National Diet held hearings over rises in muggings caused by the release of Dragon Quest III.[212] Series executive producer Yuu Miyake said that while the police did complain to the company about the games' releases causing increases in truancies, the decision to change the release dates from Thursdays to Saturdays was on Square Enix's own volition.[213][214]Dragon Quest X was released on a Thursday, long after the decision had been put in place, further discrediting the claim.[215]
The Pyramids of Egypt were not constructed with slave labor. Archeological evidence shows that the laborers were a combination of skilled workers and poor farmers working in the off-season, the latter likely recruited for national service, with the participants paid in high-quality food and tax exemption status.[223][224][225][226][227] The idea that slaves were used originated with the writings of ancient Greek historian Herodotus, and the idea that Israelite slaves were specifically used arose centuries after the pyramids were constructed.[225][227][228]
Ancient Greek sculptures were originally painted colors.[229]Ancient Greek and Roman sculptures were originally painted with colors; they only appear white today because the original pigments have deteriorated. Some well-preserved statues still bear traces of their original coloration.[229][230]
The ancient Greeks did not use the word "idiot" (Ancient Greek: ἰδιώτης, romanized: idiṓtēs) to disparage people who did not take part in civic life or who did not vote. An ἰδιώτης was simply a private citizen as opposed to a government official. Later, the word came to mean any sort of non-expert or layman, then someone uneducated or ignorant, and much later to mean stupid or mentally deficient.[232]
The ancient Romans did not use the Roman salute, as depicted in the painting The Oath of the Horatii (1784). The Roman salute, in which the arm is fully extended forwards or diagonally with palm down and fingers touching, was not used in ancient Rome. The gesture was first associated with ancient Rome in the 1784 painting The Oath of the Horatii by the French artist Jacques-Louis David, which inspired later salutes, most notably the Nazi salute.[233]
Julius Caesar was not born via caesarean section. Such a procedure would have been fatal to the mother at the time, and Caesar's mother was still alive when Caesar was 45 years old.[236][237] The name "caesarean" probably comes from the Latin verb caedere 'to cut'.[238]
The death of the Greek philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria at the hands of a mob of Christian monks in 415 was mainly a result of her involvement in a bitter political feud between her close friend and student Orestes, the Roman prefect of Alexandria, and the bishop Cyril, not her religious views.[239] Her death also had nothing to do with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria,[240] which had likely already ceased to exist centuries before Hypatia was born.[240]
The Middle Ages were not "a time of ignorance, barbarism and superstition"; the Church did not place religious authority over personal experience and rational activity; and the term "Dark Ages" is rejected by modern historians.[242]
While modern life expectancies are much higher than those in the Middle Ages and earlier,[243] adults in the Middle Ages did not die in their 30s or 40s on average. That was the life expectancy at birth, which was skewed by high infant and adolescent mortality. The life expectancy among adults was much higher;[244] a 21-year-old man in medieval England, for example, could expect to live to the age of 64.[245][244]
Vikings did not name Iceland "Iceland" as a ploy to discourage others from settling it. Naddodd and Hrafna-Flóki Vilgerðarson both saw snow and ice on the island when they traveled there, giving the island its name.[248]Greenland, on the other hand, was named in the hope that it would help attract settlers.[249]
In the tale of King Canute and the tide, the king did not command the tide to reverse in a fit of delusional arrogance.[250] His intent, according to the story, was most likely to prove a point to members of his privy council that no man is all-powerful, and all people must bend to forces beyond their control, such as the tides.
Marco Polo did not import pasta from China,[251] a misconception that originated with the Macaroni Journal, published by an association of food industries to promote the use of pasta in the United States.[252] Marco Polo describes a food similar to "lasagna" in his Travels, but he uses a term with which he was already familiar.
There is no evidence that iron maidens were used for torture, or even yet invented, in the Middle Ages. Instead they were pieced together in the 18th century from several artifacts found in museums to create spectacular objects intended for (commercial) exhibition.[253]
An anti-clockwise spiral staircase at Hohenzollern Castle in Germany. The choice of anticlockwise or clockwise spirals in castles had more to do with convenience than with hindering right-handed attackers.Spiral staircases in castles were not designed in a clockwise direction to hinder right-handed attackers.[254][255] While clockwise spiral staircases are more common in castles than anti-clockwise, they were even more common in medieval structures without a military role such as religious buildings.[256][254]
The plate armor of European soldiers did not stop soldiers from moving around or necessitate a crane to get them into a saddle. They would routinely fight on foot and could mount and dismount without help.[257] However, armor used in tournaments in the late Middle Ages was significantly heavier than that used in warfare,[258] which may have contributed to this misconception.
Whether chastity belts, devices designed to prevent women from having sexual intercourse, were invented in medieval times is disputed by modern historians. Most existing chastity belts are now thought to be deliberate fakes or anti-masturbatory devices from the 19th and early 20th centuries.[259]
Medieval cartographers did not regularly write "here be dragons" on their maps. The only maps from this era that have the phrase inscribed on them are the Hunt-Lenox Globe and the Ostrich Egg Globe, next to a coast in Southeast Asia for both of them. Maps instead were more likely to have "here are lions" inscribed. Maps in this period did occasionally have illustrations of mythical beasts like dragons and sea serpents, as well as exotic animals like elephants, on them.[262][263][264][265]
The Mexica people of the Aztec Empire did not mistake Hernán Cortés and his landing party for gods during Cortés' conquest of the empire. This myth came from Francisco López de Gómara, who never went to Mexico and concocted the myth while working for the retired Cortés in Spain years after the conquest.[270]
The early settlers of the Plymouth Colony in North America usually did not wear all black, and their capotains (hats) were shorter and rounder than the widely depicted tall hat with a buckle on it. Instead, their fashion was based on that of the late Elizabethan era.[271] The traditional image was formed in the 19th century when buckles were a kind of emblem of quaintness.[272] (The Puritans, who also settled in Massachusetts near the same time, did frequently wear all black.)[273]
The familiar story that Isaac Newton was inspired to research the nature of gravity by an apple hitting his head is almost certainly apocryphal. All Newton himself ever said was that the idea came to him as he sat "in a contemplative mood" and "was occasioned by the fall of an apple".[274]
The phrase "let them eat cake" is commonly misattributed to Marie Antoinette.Marie Antoinette did not say "let them eat cake (brioche)" when she heard that the French peasantry were starving due to a shortage of bread. The phrase was first published in Rousseau's Confessions when Marie was only nine years old and not attributed to her, just to "a great princess". The phrase was used as anti-monarchist propaganda.[276]
George Washington did not have wooden teeth. His dentures were made of gold, hippopotamus ivory, lead, animal teeth (including horse and donkey teeth),[277] and probably human teeth purchased from slaves.[278]
The signing of the United States Declaration of Independence did not occur on July 4, 1776. After the Second Continental Congress voted to declare independence on July 2, the final language of the document was approved on July 4, and it was printed and distributed on July 4–5.[279] However, the actual signing occurred on August 2, 1776.[280]
Benjamin Franklin did not propose that the wild turkey be used as the symbol for the United States instead of the bald eagle. While he did serve on a commission that tried to design a seal after the Declaration of Independence, his proposal was an image of Moses. His objections to the eagle as a national symbol and preference for the turkey were stated in a 1784 letter to his daughter in response to the Society of the Cincinnati's use of the former; he never expressed that sentiment publicly.[281]
There was never a bill to make German the official language of the United States that was defeated by one vote in the House of Representatives, nor has one been proposed at the state level. In 1794, a petition from a group of German immigrants was put aside on a procedural vote of 42 to 41, that would have had the government publish some laws in German. This was the basis of the Muhlenberg legend, named after the Speaker of the House at the time, Frederick Muhlenberg, a speaker of German descent who abstained from this vote.[282]
Modern
Napoleon on the Bellerophon by Charles Lock Eastlake. Napoleon was taller than his nickname, le Petit Caporal, suggests.Napoleon Bonaparte was not especially short for a Frenchman of his time. He was the height of an average French male in 1800, but short for an aristocrat or officer.[283] After his death in 1821, the French emperor's height was recorded as 5 feet 2 inches in French feet, which in English measurements is 5 feet 7 inches (1.70 m).[284] There are competing explanations for why he was nicknamed le Petit Caporal (The Little Corporal), one possibility is that the moniker was used as a term of endearment.[285] Napoleon was often accompanied by his imperial guard, who were selected for their height, and this may have contributed to a perception that he was comparatively short.[286]
Cinco de Mayo is not Mexico's Independence Day, but the celebration of the Mexican Army's victory over the French in the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862. Mexico's Declaration of Independence from Spain in 1810 is celebrated on September 16.[287]
Albert Einstein, photographed at 14, did not fail mathematics at school.Albert Einstein did not fail mathematics classes in school. Einstein remarked, "I never failed in mathematics.... Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus."[289] Einstein did, however, fail his first entrance exam into the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School (ETH) in 1895, when he was two years younger than his fellow students, but scored exceedingly well in the mathematics and science sections, then passed on his second attempt.[290]
Alfred Nobel did not omit mathematics in the Nobel Prize due to a rivalry with mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler, as there is little evidence the two ever met, nor was it because Nobel's spouse had an affair with a mathematician, as Nobel was never married. The more likely explanation is that Nobel believed mathematics was too theoretical to benefit humankind, as well as his personal lack of interest in the field.[291] (See also: Nobel Prize controversies)
The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini did not "make the trains run on time". Much of the repair work had been performed before he and the Fascist Party came to power in 1922. Moreover, the Italian railways' supposed adherence to timetables was more propaganda than reality.[292]
There is no evidence of Polish cavalry mounting a brave but futile charge against German tanks using lances and sabers during the German invasion of Poland in 1939. This story may have originated from German propaganda efforts following the charge at Krojanty, in which a Polish cavalry brigade surprised German infantry in the open, and successfully charged and dispersed them, until driven off by armored cars. While Polish cavalry still carried the saber for such opportunities, they were trained to fight as highly mobile, dismounted cavalry (dragoons) and issued with light anti-tank weapons.[293]
US President John F. Kennedy's words "Ich bin ein Berliner" are standard German for "I am a Berliner (citizen of Berlin)."[297] It is not true that by not leaving out the indefinite article "ein", he changed the meaning of the sentence from the intended "I am a citizen of Berlin" to "I am a Berliner", a Berliner being a type of German pastry, similar to a jelly donut, amusing Germans.[298] Furthermore, the pastry which is known by many names in Germany was not then nor is it now commonly called "Berliner" in the Berlin area.[299]
Although popularly known as the "red telephone", the Moscow–Washington hotline was never a telephone line, nor were red phones used. The first implementation of the hotline used teletype equipment, which was replaced by facsimile (fax) machines in 1988. Since 2008, the hotline has been a secure computer link over which the two countries exchange email.[300] Moreover, the hotline links the Kremlin to the Pentagon, not the White House.[301]
Not all skinheads are white supremacists; many skinheads identify as left-wing or apolitical, and many oppose racism, for example the Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice.[302][303][304][305] The subculture originated from the 1950s British working class, whose members were influenced by both black and Jamaican music and subcultures, particularly the Jamaican rude boy subculture and the mods subculture. As a result, many initial skinheads were either black or West Indian.[304] The association between skinheads and white supremacy came about in the 1970s and 1980s as a result of far-right groups like the National Front and the British Movement recruiting from the subculture to obtain grassroots support,[304] some punk bands within the movement adopting Nazi imagery for shock value,[306] and an incident in July 1981 when skinheads attending a concert in a predominantly South Asian neighborhood in London rioted and attacked several Asian-owned stores.[307][304]
Russia does not explicitly have an independence day, nor is there a date that officially commemorates such an occasion. There have been many states that predate the current Russian Federation, and the public holiday of Russia Day only celebrates the establishment of present-day Russia, which occurred on June 12, 1990. Both Russians and foreigners commonly refer to Russia Day as "Russia's Independence Day" since it reflects the break from the Soviet Union that held dominion over Russia from 1922 to 1991.[308]
The Alaska Purchase was generally popular in the United States, both among the public and the press. The opponents of the purchase who characterized it as "Seward's Folly", alluding to William H. Seward, the Secretary of State who negotiated it, represented a minority opinion at the time.[317]
The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 was not caused by Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicking over a lantern. A newspaper reporter later admitted to having invented the story to make colorful copy.[320]
There is no evidence that Frederic Remington, on assignment to Cuba in 1897, telegraphed William Randolph Hearst, "There will be no war. I wish to return," and that Hearst responded, "Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war". The anecdote was originally included in a book by James Creelman, and probably never happened.[321]
Immigrants' last names were not Americanized (voluntarily, mistakenly, or otherwise) upon arrival at Ellis Island. Officials there kept no records other than checking ship manifests created at the point of origin, and there was simply no paperwork that would have let them recast surnames, let alone any law. At the time in New York, anyone could change the spelling of their name simply by using that new spelling.[322] These names are often referred to as an "Ellis Island Special".
Distraught stockbrokers did not jump to their deaths after the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The source of this myth seems to be Winston Churchill's account of a man jumping off the Savoy-Plaza Hotel, just one floor below where Churchill was staying. In fact, he was a German tourist, and his fall was reported as accidental.[323]
There was no widespread outbreak of panic across the United States in response to Orson Welles's 1938 radio adaptation of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds. Only a very small share of the radio audience was listening to it, but newspapers played up isolated reports of incidents and increased emergency calls being eager to discredit radio as a competitor for advertising. Both Welles and CBS, which had initially reacted apologetically, later came to realize that the myth benefited them and actively embraced it in later years.[324]
U.S. Senator George Smathers never gave a speech to a rural audience describing his opponent, Claude Pepper, as an "extrovert" whose sister was a "thespian", in the apparent hope they would confuse them with similar-sounding words like "pervert" and "lesbian". Smathers offered US$10,000 to anyone who could prove he had made the speech; it was never claimed.[329]
Rosa Parks was not sitting in the front ("white") section of the bus during the event that made her famous and incited the Montgomery bus boycott. Rather, she was sitting in the front of the back ("colored") section of the bus, where African Americans were expected to sit, and rejected an order from the driver to vacate her seat in favor of a white passenger when the "white" section of the bus had become full.[330]
The African-American intellectual and activist W.E.B. Du Bois did not renounce his U.S. citizenship while living in Ghana shortly before his death.[331][332] In early 1963, his membership in the Communist Party and support for the Soviet Union led the U.S. State Department not to renew his passport while he was already in Ghana. After leaving the embassy, he stated his intention to renounce his citizenship in protest. But while he took Ghanaian citizenship, he never actually renounced his American citizenship.[333][331]
When Kitty Genovese was murdered outside her apartment in 1964, there were not 37 neighbors standing idly by and watching who failed to call the police until after she was dead, as initially reported[334] to widespread public outrage that persisted for years and even became the basis of a theory in social psychology. In fact, witnesses only heard brief portions of the attack and did not realize what was occurring, and only six or seven actually saw anything. One witness who called the police said, "I didn't want to get involved",[335] an attitude later attributed to all the neighbors.[336]
While it was praised by one architectural magazine before it was built as "the best high apartment of the year", the Pruitt–Igoehousing project in St. Louis, Missouri, considered to epitomize the failures of urban renewal in American cities after it was demolished in the early 1970s, never won any awards for its design.[337] The architectural firm that designed the buildings did win an award for an earlier St. Louis project, which may have been confused with Pruitt–Igoe.[338]
There is little contemporary documentary evidence for the notion that US Vietnam veterans were spat upon by anti-war protesters upon return to the United States. This belief was detailed in some biographical accounts and was later popularized by films such as Rambo.[339][340][341]
Women did not burn their bras outside the Miss America contest in 1969 as a protest in support of women's liberation. They did symbolically throw bras in a trash can, along with other articles seen as emblematic of the woman's position in American society such as mops, make-up, and high-heeled shoes. The myth of bra burning came when a journalist hypothetically suggested that women may in future do so, as men of the era burned their draft cards.[342]
Despite being the origin of the phrase "drinking the Kool-Aid", and the fact that Kool-Aid was consumed on-site for both normal purposes and for trial runs,[343] Kool-Aid was not used for the potassium cyanide-fruit punch mix ingested as part of the Jonestown massacre.[344][345][346] A Washington Post article stated that Flavor-Aid packets were found at the site,[347] an eyewitness account said that Flavor-Aid was used,[348] and Kraft Foods confirmed that Kool-Aid was not used.[349] The misconception most likely arose from erroneous reporting from an initial Post article,[350] coroners using the term "Cool Aid" [sic] for an early inquest in the generic sense,[345] conflation with stories from the 1968 book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test that described the use of Kool-Aid laced with LSD,[351][345] and the name "Kool-Aid" being more familiar to the public than Flavor-Aid.[345]
A satellite image of a section of the Great Wall of China, running diagonally from lower left to upper right (not to be confused with the much more prominent river running from upper left to lower right). The region pictured is 12 by 12 kilometers (7.5 mi × 7.5 mi). The Great Wall of China is not, as is claimed, the only human-made object visible from space or from the Moon. None of the Apollo astronauts reported seeing any specific human-made object from the Moon, and even Earth-orbiting astronauts can see it only with magnification. City lights, however, are easily visible on the night side of Earth from orbit.[355]
Spacecraft are never in "zero-gravity" or "zero-g". If a spacecraft is in free-fall it may be experiencing zero G-force, that is, the craft may be weightless, but this is very different from there being no gravity. The only reason why an object orbiting a planet remains in orbit is because the object is being influenced by the planet's gravity, and gravitational fields still exist even in the depths of intergalactic space. At an altitude of 400 kilometres (250 mi), equivalent to a typical orbit of the International Space Station, the Earth's gravity is still nearly 90% as strong as at the surface.[356][357][358][359] Astronauts in space experience weightlessness not because of a lack of gravity but because they are orbiting Earth in constant free-fall. While in orbit, spacecraft may not even experience zero G-forces; on the International Space Station, for example, small G-forces come from tidal effects, gravity from objects other than the Earth such as astronauts, spacecraft, and other celestial bodies, as well as air resistance and internal movements that impart momentum to the space station.[360][361]
Black holes have the same gravitational effects as any other equal mass in their place. They will draw objects nearby towards them, just as any other celestial body does, except at very close distances to the black hole—comparable to its Schwarzschild radius.[367] If, for example, the Sun were replaced by a black hole of equal mass, the orbits of the planets would be essentially unaffected. A black hole can pull a substantial inflow of surrounding matter, but only if the star from which it formed was already doing so.[368]
Egg balancing is possible on every day of the year, not just the vernal equinox,[375] and there is no relationship between any astronomical phenomenon and the ability to balance an egg.[376]
The Fisher Space Pen was not commissioned by NASA at a cost of millions of dollars, while the Soviets used pencils. It was independently developed by Paul C. Fisher, founder of the Fisher Pen Company, with $1 million of his own funds.[377] NASA tested and approved the pen for space use, then purchased 400 pens at $6 per pen.[378] The Soviet Union subsequently also purchased the space pen for its Soyuz spaceflights.[379]
The Sun is actually white rather than yellow.[381] It is atmospheric scattering that causes the Sun to look yellow, orange, or red at sunrise and sunset.[381]
The Big Bang model does not fully explain the origin of the universe. It does not describe how energy, time, and space were caused, but rather it describes the emergence of the present universe from an ultra-dense and high-temperature initial state.[382]
The color of a red cape does not enrage a bull. Bulls are not enraged by the color red, used in capes by professional matadors. Cattle are dichromats, so red does not stand out as a bright color. It is not the color of the cape, but the perceived threat by the matador that incites it to charge.[393]
Lemmings do not engage in mass suicidal dives off cliffs when migrating. The scenes of lemming suicides in the Disney documentary film White Wilderness, which popularized this idea, were completely fabricated.[394] The misconception itself is much older, dating back to at least the late 19th century, though its exact origins are uncertain.[395]
Dogs do not sweat by salivating.[396] Dogs actually do have sweat glands and not only on their tongues; they sweat mainly through their footpads. However, dogs do primarily regulate their body temperature through panting.[397] (See also: Dog anatomy)
Dogs do not consistently age seven times as quickly as humans. Aging in dogs varies widely depending on the breed; certain breeds, such as giant dog breeds and English bulldogs, have much shorter lifespans than average. Most dogs age consistently across all breeds in the first year of life, reaching adolescence by one year old; smaller and medium-sized breeds begin to age more slowly in adulthood.[398]
The phases of the moon have no effect on the vocalizations of wolves, and wolves do not howl at the moon.[399] Wolves howl to assemble the pack usually before and after hunts, to pass on an alarm particularly at a den site, to locate each other during a storm, while crossing unfamiliar territory, and to communicate across great distances.[400]
There is no such thing as an "alpha" in a wolf pack. An early study that coined the term "alpha wolf" had only observed unrelated adult wolves living in captivity. In the wild, wolf packs operate more like human families: there is no defined sense of rank, parents are in charge until the young grow up and start their own families, younger wolves do not overthrow an "alpha" to become the new leader, and social dominance fights are situational.[401][402]
Bats are not blind. While about 70% of bat species, mainly in the microbat family, use echolocation to navigate, all bat species have eyes and are capable of sight. In addition, almost all bats in the megabat or fruit bat family cannot echolocate and have excellent night vision.[403]
Contrary to the apologue about the boiling frog, frogs die immediately when cast into boiling water, rather than leaping out; furthermore, frogs will attempt to escape cold water that is slowly heated past their critical thermal maximum.[404]
Sharks can have cancer. The misconception that sharks do not get cancer was spread by the 1992 book Sharks Don't Get Cancer, which was used to sell extracts of shark cartilage as cancer prevention treatments. Reports of carcinomas in sharks exist, and current data do not support any conclusions about the incidence of tumors in sharks.[407]
Great white sharks do not mistake human divers for seals, nor other pinnipeds. When attacking pinnipeds, the shark surfaces quickly and attacks violently. In contrast, attacks on humans are slower and less violent: the shark charges at a normal pace, bites, and swims off. Great white sharks have efficient eyesight and color vision; the bite is not predatory, but rather for identification of an unfamiliar object.[408]
Snake jaws cannot unhinge. The posterior end of the lower jaw bones contains a quadrate bone, allowing jaw extension. The anterior tips of the lower jaw bones are joined by a flexible ligament allowing them to bow outwards, increasing the mouth gape.[409][410]
Porcupines do not shoot their quills. They can detach, and porcupines will deliberately back into attackers to impale them, but their quills do not project.[413][414][415]
Mice do not have a special appetite for cheese, and will eat it only for lack of better options; they actually favor sweet, sugary foods. The myth may have come from the fact that before refrigeration, cheese was usually stored outside and was therefore an easy food for mice to reach.[416]
There is no credible evidence that the candiru, a South American parasitic catfish, can swim up a human urethra if one urinates in the water in which it lives. The sole documented case of such an incident, written in 1997, has been heavily criticized upon peer review, and this phenomenon is now largely considered a myth.[417]
Piranhas do not only eat meat but are omnivorous, and they only swim in schools to defend themselves from predators and not to attack. They very rarely attack humans, only when under stress and feeling threatened, and even then, bites typically only occur on hands and feet.[418]
The hippopotamus does not produce pink milk. Hipposudoric acid, a red pigment found in hippo skin secretions, does not affect the color of their milk, which is white or beige.[419]
Pacus, South American fish related to piranhas, do not attack or feed on human testicles. This myth originated from a misinterpreted joke in a 2013 report of a pacu being found in Øresund, the strait between Sweden and Denmark, which claimed that the fish ate "nuts."[420][421]
The Pacific tree frog is the only frog species that makes a "ribbit" sound. The misconception that all frogs, or at least all those found in North America, make this sound comes from its extensive use in Hollywood films.[422][423][424]
The bold, powerful cry commonly associated with the bald eagle in popular culture is actually that of a red-tailed hawk. Bald eagle vocalizations are much softer and chirpy, and bear far more resemblance to the calls of gulls.[425][426]
Ostriches do not stick their heads in the sand to hide from enemies or to sleep.[427] This misconception's origins are uncertain but it was probably popularized by Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE), who wrote that ostriches "imagine, when they have thrust their head and neck into a bush, that the whole of their body is concealed."[428]
A duck's quack actually does echo,[429] although the echo may be difficult to hear for humans under some circumstances.[430] Despite this, a British panel show compiling interesting facts has been given the same name.
Invertebrates
Bombus pratorum over an Echinacea purpurea inflorescence; a widespread misconception holds that bumblebees should be incapable of flight.
Earthworms do not become two worms when cut in half. Only a limited number of earthworm species[431] are capable of anterior regeneration. When such earthworms are bisected, only the front half of the worm (where the mouth is located) can feed and survive, while the other half dies.[432] Some species of planarianflatworms, however, actually do become two new planarians when bisected or split down the middle.[433]
Houseflies have an average lifespan of 20 to 30 days, not 24 hours.[434] The misconception may arise from confusion with mayflies, which, in some species, have an adult lifespan of as little as 5 minutes.[435]
The daddy longlegs spider (Pholcidae) is not the most venomous spider in the world; though they can indeed pierce human skin, the tiny amount of venom they carry causes only a mild burning sensation for a few seconds.[436] In addition, there is confusion regarding the use of the name daddy longlegs, because harvestmen (order Opiliones, which are arachnids but not spiders, and have no venom), crane flies (which are insects), and male mosquitoes (also insects) are also sometimes called daddy longlegs in regional dialects, and may occasionally share the misconception of being venomous.[437][438]
It is not true that aerodynamic theory predicts that bumblebees should not be able to fly; the physics of insect flight is quite well understood. The misconception appears to come from a calculation based on a fixed-wing aircraft mentioned in a 1934 book.[444]
Earwigs are not known to purposely climb into external ear canals, though there have been anecdotal reports of earwigs being found in the ear.[445] Entomologists suggest that the origin of the name is actually a reference to the appearance of the hindwings, which are unique and distinctive among insects, and resemble a human ear when unfolded.[446][447]
While certainly critical to the pollination of many plant species, European honey bees are not essential to human food production, despite claims that without their pollination, humanity would starve or die out "within four years".[448] In fact, many important crops need no insect pollination at all. The ten most important crops,[449] accounting for 60% of all human food energy,[450] all fall into this category.
Ticks do not jump nor fall from trees onto their hosts. Instead, they lie in wait to grasp and climb onto any passing host or otherwise trace down hosts via, for example, olfactory stimuli, the host's body heat, or carbon dioxide in the host's breath.[451][452][453]
Carnivorous plants do survive without food. Catching insects, however, supports their growth.[462]
Poinsettias are not highly toxic to humans or cats. While it is true that they are mildly irritating to the skin or stomach,[463] and may sometimes cause diarrhea and vomiting if eaten, they rarely cause serious medical problems.[464]
Sunflowers with the Sun clearly visible behind themSunflowers do not always point to the Sun. Flowering sunflowers face a fixed direction (often east) all day long, but do not necessarily face the Sun.[465] However, in an earlier developmental stage, before the appearance of flower heads, the immature buds do track the Sun (a phenomenon called heliotropism), and the fixed alignment of the mature flowers toward a certain direction is often the result.[466]
The word theory in "the theory of evolution" does not imply scientific doubt regarding its validity; the concepts of theory and hypothesis have specific meanings in a scientific context. While theory in colloquial usage may denote a hunch or conjecture, a scientific theory is a set of principles that explains an observable phenomenon in natural terms.[470][471] "Scientific fact and theory are not categorically separable",[472] and evolution is a theory in the same sense as germ theory or the theory of gravitation.[473]
The theory of evolution does not attempt to explain the origin of life[474] or the origin and development of the universe. The theory of evolution deals primarily with changes in successive generations over time after life has already originated.[475] The scientific model concerned with the origin of the first organisms from organic or inorganic molecules is known as abiogenesis, and the prevailing theory for explaining the early development of the universe is the Big Bang model.
Evolution is not a progression from inferior to superior organisms, and it also does not necessarily result in an increase in complexity. Evolution through natural selection only causes organisms to become more fit for their environment.[476] A population can evolve to become simpler or to have a smaller genome,[477] and atavistic ancestral genetic traits can reappear after having been lost through evolutionary change in previous generations.[478] Biological devolution or de-evolution is a misnomer, not only because it implies that organisms can only evolve backward or forward, but also because it implies that evolution may cause organisms to evolve in the "wrong" direction.[479][480]
Evolution does not "plan" to improve an organism's fitness to survive.[484][485] The misconception is encouraged as it is common shorthand for biologists to speak of a purpose as a concise form of expression (sometimes called the "metaphor of purpose");[486] it is less cumbersome to say "Dinosaurs may have evolved feathers for courtship" than "Feathers may have been selected for when they arose as they gave dinosaurs a selective advantage during courtship over their non-feathered rivals".[487]
Mutations are not entirely random, nor do they occur at the same frequency everywhere in the genome. Certain regions of an organism's genome will be more or less likely to undergo mutation depending on the presence of DNA repair mechanisms and other mutation biases. For instance, in a study on Arabidopsis thaliana, biologically important regions of the plant's genome were found to be protected from mutations, and beneficial mutations were found to be more likely, i.e. mutation was "non-random in a way that benefits the plant".[488][489][490]
Dimetrodon, the iconic sail-backedsynapsid, was not a dinosaur, nor did it live at the same time as the dinosaurs.Dimetrodon is often mistakenly called a dinosaur or considered to be a contemporary of dinosaurs in popular culture, but it became extinct some 40 million years before the first appearance of dinosaurs. Being a synapsid, Dimetrodon is actually more closely related to mammals than to dinosaurs, birds, lizards, or other diapsids.[501][502][503][504]
Humans and non-avian dinosaurs did not coexist.[506] The last of the non-avian dinosaurs died 66 million years ago in the course of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, whereas the earliest members of genus Homo (humans) evolved between 2.3 and 2.4 million years ago. This places a 63-million-year expanse of time between the last non-avian dinosaurs and the earliest humans. Humans did coexist with woolly mammoths and saber-toothed cats—mammals often erroneously depicted alongside non-avian dinosaurs.[507] Humans and dinosaurs, specifically birds, did (and do) coexist.
Most diamonds are not formed from highly compressed coal. More than 99% of diamonds ever mined have formed in the conditions of extreme heat and pressure about 140 kilometers (87 mi) below the earth's surface. Coal is formed from prehistoric plants buried much closer to the surface, and is unlikely to migrate below 3.2 kilometers (2.0 mi) through common geological processes. Most diamonds that have been dated are older than the first land plants, and are therefore older than coal.[543]
Diamonds are not infinitely hard, and are subject to wear and scratching: although they are the hardest known material on the Mohs Scale, they can be scratched by other diamonds[544] and worn down even by much softer materials, such as vinyl records.[545]
Neither tin foil nor tin cans still use tin as a primary material. Aluminum foil has replaced tin foil in almost all uses since the 20th century; tin cans now primarily use steel or aluminum as their main metal.[546]
The deep web is not primarily full of pornography, illegal drug trade websites, and stolen bank details. This information is primarily found in a small portion of the deep web known as the "dark web". Much of the deep web consists of academic libraries, databases, and anything that is not indexed by normal search engines.[552][553][554][555]
Private browsing (such as Chrome's "Incognito Mode") does not protect users from being tracked by websites, employers, governments, or one's internet service provider (ISP). Such entities can still use information such as IP addresses and user accounts to uniquely identify users.[556][557] Private browsing also does not provide additional protection against viruses or malware.[558]
Submerging a mobile phone which has suffered from water damage into rice has not been shown to be effective in repairing them.[559][560] Even if submerging them in a desiccant were more effective than leaving them to dry in open air, common desiccants such as silica gel or cat litter are better than rice.[561]
Economics
Total population living in extreme poverty, by world region 1987 to 2015[562] The total number of people living in extremeabsolute poverty globally, by the widely used metric of $1.00/day (in 1990 U.S. dollars) has decreased over the last several decades, but most people surveyed in several countries incorrectly think it has increased or stayed the same.[563]
Human population growth is decreasing and the world population is expected to peak and then begin falling during the 21st century. Improvements in agricultural productivity and technology are expected to be able to meet anticipated increased demand for resources, making a global human overpopulation scenario unlikely.[564][565][566]
Monopolists do not try to sell items for the highest possible price, nor do they try to maximize profit per unit, but rather they try to maximize total profit.[567]
For any given production set, there is not a set amount of labor input (a "lump of labor") to produce that output. This fallacy is commonly seen in Luddite and later, related movements as an argument either that automation causes permanent, structural unemployment, or that labor-limiting regulation can decrease unemployment. But, in fact, changes in capital allocation, efficiency, and economies of learning can change the amount of labor input for a given set of production.[568]
Income is not a direct factor in determining credit score in the United States. Rather, credit score is impacted by the amount of unused available credit, which is in turn affected by income.[569] Income is also considered when evaluating creditworthiness more generally.
The US public vastly overestimates the amount spent on foreign aid.[570]
In the US, an increase in gross income will never reduce one's post-tax earnings (net income) due to putting one in a higher tax bracket. The tax brackets only indicate the marginal tax rate, as opposed to the total income tax rate; only the additional income earned in the higher tax bracket is taxed at the elevated rate.[571] An increase in gross income can reduce one's net income in a welfare cliff, however, when benefits are suddenly withdrawn when passing a certain income threshold.[572]
The idea that lightning never strikes the same place twice is one of the oldest and best-known superstitions about lightning, but has no basis in evidence. Lightning in a thunderstorm is more likely to strike objects and spots the more prominent or conductive they are. For instance, lightning strikes the Empire State Building in New York City about 100 times per year.[588][589]
Heat lightning does not exist as a distinct phenomenon. What is mistaken for "heat lightning" is usually ordinary lightning from storms too distant to hear the associated thunder.[590]
The Earth's interior is not molten rock. This misconception may originate from a misunderstanding based on the fact that the Earth's mantle convects, and the incorrect assumption that only liquids and gases can convect. In fact, solids with a large Rayleigh number can also convect, given enough time, which is what occurs in the solid mantle due to the very large thermal gradient across it.[592][593] There are small pockets of molten rock in the upper mantle, but these make up a tiny fraction of the mantle's volume.[594] The Earth's outer core is liquid, but it is liquid metal, not rock.[595]
The Amazon rainforest does not provide 20% of Earth's oxygen. This is a misinterpretation of a 2010 study which found that approximately 34% of photosynthesis by terrestrial plants occurs in tropical rainforests (so the Amazon rainforest would account for approximately half of this). Due to respiration by the resident organisms, all ecosystems (including the Amazon rainforest) have a net output of oxygen of approximately zero. The oxygen currently present in the atmosphere was accumulated over billions of years.[596]
A widely held misconception in South Korea is that leaving electric fans on while asleep can be fatal.Sleeping in a closed room with an electric fan running does not result in "fan death", as is widely believed in South Korea.[598]
Waking up a sleepwalker does not harm them. Sleepwalkers may be confused or disoriented for a short time after awakening, but the health risks associated with sleepwalking are from injury or insomnia, not from being awakened.[599]
Drowning is often inconspicuous to onlookers.[600] In most cases, the instinctive drowning response prevents the victim from waving or yelling (known as "aquatic distress"),[600] which are therefore not dependable signs of trouble; indeed, most drowning victims undergoing the response do not show prior evidence of distress.[601]
Human blood in veins is not actually blue. Blood is red due to the presence of hemoglobin; deoxygenated blood (in veins) has a deep red color, and oxygenated blood (in arteries) has a light cherry-red color. Veins below the skin can appear blue or green due to subsurface scattering of light through the skin, and aspects of human color perception. Many medical diagrams also use blue to show veins, and red to show arteries, which contributes to this misconception.[602]
Exposure to a vacuum, or experiencing all but the most extreme uncontrolled decompression, does not cause the body to explode, or internal fluids to boil. (However, fluids in the mouth or lungs will boil at altitudes above the Armstrong limit.) Instead, it will lead to a loss of consciousness once the body has depleted the supply of oxygen in the blood, followed by death from hypoxia within minutes.[603]
Exercise-induced delayed onset muscle soreness is not caused by lactic acid build-up. Muscular lactic acid levels return to normal levels within an hour after exercise; delayed onset muscle soreness is thought to be due to microtrauma from unaccustomed or strenuous exercise.[605]
Swallowing gasoline does not generally require special emergency treatment, as long as it goes into the stomach and not the lungs, and inducing vomiting can make it worse.[606]
Cremated remains are not ashes in the usual sense. After the incineration is completed, the dry bone fragments are swept out of the retort and pulverized by a machine called a Cremulator—essentially a high-capacity, high-speed blender—to process them into "ashes" or "cremated remains".[609]
The lung's alveoli are not tiny balloons that expand and contract under positive pressure following the Young–Laplace equation, as is taught in some physiology and medical textbooks. The tissue structure is more like a sponge with polygonal spaces that unfold and fold under negative pressure from the chest wall.[610]
Half of body heat is not lost through the head, and covering the head is no more effective at preventing heat loss than covering any other portion of the body. Heat is lost from the body in proportion to the amount of exposed skin.[611][612] The head accounts for around 7–9% of the body's surface, and studies have shown that having one's head submerged in cold water only causes a person to lose 10% more heat overall.[613] This myth likely comes from a flawed United States military experiment in 1950, involving a prototype Arctic survival suit where the head was one of the few body parts left exposed.[614] The misconception was further perpetuated by a 1970 military field manual that claimed "40–45%" of heat is lost through the head, based on the 1950 study.[612][614]
Adrenochrome is not harvested from living people and has no use as a recreational drug. Hunter S. Thompson conceived a fictional drug of the same name in his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, apparently as a metaphor and unaware that a real substance by that name existed; it is Thompson's fictional adrenochrome, and not the real chemical compound, that is the source of numerous conspiracy theories revolving around human trafficking to harvest the fictional drug.[615][616]
Men and women have the same number of ribs, 24 or 12 pairs. The erroneous idea that women have one more rib than men may stem from the biblical creation story of Adam and Eve.[617][618]
The use of cotton swabs (aka cotton buds or Q-Tips) in the ear canal has no associated medical benefits and poses definite medical risks.[619][620][621][622]
The five stages of grief model, let alone the idea that there are any stages to grief, is not supported in peer-reviewed research or objective clinical observation.[623][624][625][626] The model was originally based on uncredited work and originally applied to the terminally ill instead of the grieving or bereaved.[627]
The common cold is caused by viruses, not cold temperature, although cold temperature may somewhat weaken the immune system, and someone already infected with a cold virus but showing no symptoms can become symptomatic after they are exposed to low temperatures.[628][629] Viruses are more likely to spread during the winter for a variety of reasons such as dry air, less air circulation in homes, people spending more time indoors, and lower vitamin D levels in humans.[630][631][632]
Antibiotics will not cure a cold, as they are ineffectual against viruses.[633][634] There may, however, be cases in which an opportunistic infection by bacterial pathogens needs to be treated by antibiotics.[635]
In those with the common cold, the color of the sputum or nasal secretion may vary from clear to yellow to green and does not indicate the class of agent causing the infection.[636]
Vitamin Cdoes not prevent or treat the common cold, although it may have a protective effect during intense cold-weather exercise. If taken daily, it may slightly reduce the duration and severity of colds, but it has no effect if taken after the cold starts.[637]
The bumps on a toad are not warts and cannot cause warts on humans. Humans cannot catch warts from toads or other animals; the bumps on a toad are not warts.[638]Warts on human skin are caused by human papillomavirus, which is unique to humans.
In people with eczema, bathing does not dry the skin and may in fact be beneficial.[640]
There have never been any programs in the US that provide access to dialysis machines in exchange for pull tabs on beverage cans.[641] This rumor has existed since at least the 1970s, and usually cites the National Kidney Foundation as the organization offering the program. The Foundation itself has denied the rumor, noting that dialysis machines are primarily funded by Medicare.[642]
High dietary protein intake is not associated with kidney disease in healthy people.[643] While significantly increased protein intake in the short-term is associated with changes in renal function, there is no evidence to suggest this effect persists in the long-term and results in kidney damage or disease.[644]
Leprosy is not auto-degenerative as commonly supposed, meaning that it will not (on its own) cause body parts to be damaged or fall off.[646] Leprosy causes rashes to form and may degrade cartilage and, if untreated, inflame tissue. In addition, leprosy is only mildly contagious, partly because 95% of those infected with the mycobacteria that causes leprosy do not develop the disease.[647][646]Tzaraath, a Biblical disease that disfigures the skin is often identified as leprosy, and may be the source of many myths about the disease.[648]
Rust does not cause tetanus infection. The Clostridium tetani bacterium is generally found in dirty environments. Since the same conditions that harbor tetanus bacteria also promote rusting of metal, many people associate rust with tetanus. C. tetani requires anoxic conditions to reproduce and these are found in the permeable layers of rust that form on oxygen-absorbing, unprotected ironwork.[649]
Quarantine has never been a standard procedure for those with severe combined immunodeficiency, despite the condition's popular nickname ("bubble boy syndrome") and its portrayal in films. A bone marrow transplant in the earliest months of life is the standard course of treatment. The exceptional case of David Vetter, who indeed lived much of his life encased in a sterile environment because he would not receive a transplant until age 12 (the transplant, because of failure to detect mononucleosis, instead killed Vetter), was one of the primary inspirations for the "bubble boy" trope.[650]
Gunnison, Colorado, did not avoid the 1918 flu pandemic by using protective sequestration. The implementation of protective sequestration did prevent the virus from spreading outside a single household after a single carrier came into the town while it was in effect, but it was not sustainable and had to be lifted in February 1919. A month later, the flu killed five residents and infected dozens of others.[651]
Antibiotics are ineffective in treating many diseases, and their overuse is not without risks. The misconception that they are effective against many common viral infections leads to their overuse. In fact, antibiotics are used to treat bacterial diseases, not viral diseases.[652][653]
Drinking milk or consuming other dairy products does not increase mucus production.[674] As a result, they do not need to be avoided by those with the flu or cold congestion. However, milk and saliva in one's mouth mix to create a thick liquid that can briefly coat the mouth and throat. The sensation that lingers may be mistaken for increased phlegm.[675]
Drinking eight glasses (2–3 liters) of water a day is not needed to maintain health.[676] The amount of water needed varies by person (weight), diet, activity level, clothing, and environment (heat and humidity). Water does not actually need to be drunk in pure form, but can be derived from liquids such as juices, tea, milk, soups, etc., and from foods including fruits and vegetables.[676]
Drinking coffee and other caffeinated beverages does not cause dehydration for regular drinkers, although it can for occasional drinkers.[677]
Sugar does not cause hyperactivity in children.[678]Double-blind trials have shown no difference in behavior between children given sugar-full or sugar-free diets, even in studies specifically looking at children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or those considered sensitive to sugar.[679] A 2019 meta-analysis found no positive effect of sugar consumption on mood but did find an association with lower alertness and increased fatigue within an hour of consumption, known as a sugar crash.[680]
Eating less than an hour before swimming does not increase the risk of experiencing muscle cramps or drowning. One study shows a correlation between alcohol consumption and drowning, but not between eating and stomach cramps.[683]
Swallowed chewing gum does not take seven years to digest. In fact, chewing gum is mostly indigestible, and passes through the digestive system at the same rate as other matter.[690]
Monosodium glutamate (MSG) does not trigger migraine headaches or other symptoms of so-called Chinese restaurant syndrome, nor is there evidence that some individuals are especially sensitive to MSG. There is also little evidence it impacts body weight.[691]
Spicy food or coffee does not have a significant effect on the development of peptic ulcers.[692]
Raw spinach is a poor source of iron and calcium, despite its high iron and calcium content,[695][[Category:Articles with unsourced statements from October Template:2022]][citation needed] because raw spinach contains high levels of oxalates which block absorption of iron and calcium in the stomach and small intestine. Spinach cooked in several changes of water has much lower levels of oxalates and is better digested and its nutrients absorbed more completely.[696][697] In addition to preventing absorption and use, high levels of oxalates remove iron from the body.[697][698]
Most cases of obesity are not related to slower resting metabolism. Resting metabolic rate does not vary much between people. Overweight people tend to underestimate the amount of food they eat, and underweight people tend to overestimate. In fact, overweight people tend to have faster metabolic rates due to the increased energy required by the larger body.[699]
Consuming comfort food does not significantly improve mood more than other foods.[701]
Alcoholic beverages
Alcoholic beverages do not make the entire body warmer.[702] Alcoholic drinks create the sensation of warmth because they cause blood vessels to dilate and stimulate nerve endings near the surface of the skin with an influx of warm blood. This can actually result in making the core body temperature lower, as it allows for easier heat exchange with a cold external environment.[703]
Alcohol does not necessarily kill brain cells.[704] Alcohol can, however, lead indirectly to the death of brain cells in two ways. First, in chronic, heavy alcohol users whose brains have adapted to the effects of alcohol, abrupt ceasing following heavy use can cause excitotoxicity leading to cellular death in multiple areas of the brain.[705] Second, in alcoholics who get most of their daily calories from alcohol, a deficiency of thiamine can produce Korsakoff's syndrome, which is associated with serious brain damage.[706]
The order in which different types of alcoholic beverages are consumed ("Grape or grain but never the twain" and "Beer before liquor never sicker; liquor before beer in the clear") does not affect intoxication or create adverse side effects.[707]
Absinthe has no hallucinogenic properties, and is no more dangerous than any other alcoholic beverage of equivalent proof.[708] This misconception stems from late-19th- and early-20th-century distillers who produced cheap knockoff versions of absinthe, which used copper salts to recreate the distinct green color of true absinthe, and some also reportedly adulterated cheap absinthe with poisonous antimony trichloride, reputed to enhance the louching effect.[709]
A broken hymen is not a reliable indicator that a female has been vaginally penetrated, because the tearing of the hymen may have been the result of some other event,[711][712] and bleeding is not necessarily associated with the first vaginal sexual intercourse. Traditional virginity tests, such as the "two-finger" test, are widely considered to be unscientific.[713][714] Reliable forensic methods of determining whether sexual intercourse has occurred do exist; biological evidence such as semen, blood, vaginal secretions, saliva, and vaginal epithelial cells may all be identified and genetically typed, and the information derived from such analyses can often help determine whether sexual contact occurred, as well as provide information regarding the circumstances of the incident.[715]
While pregnancies from sex between first cousins do carry a slightly elevated risk of birth defects, this risk is often exaggerated.[720] The risk is 5–6% (similar to that of a woman in her early 40s giving birth),[720][721] compared with a baseline risk of 3–4%.[721] The effects of inbreeding depression, while still relatively small compared to other factors (and thus difficult to control for in a scientific experiment), become more noticeable if isolated and maintained for several generations.[722]
Having sex before a sporting event or contest is not physiologically detrimental to performance.[723] In fact it has been suggested that sex prior to sports activity can elevate male testosterone level, which could potentially enhance performance for male athletes.[724]
There is no definitive proof of the existence of the vaginal G-spot, and the general consensus is that no such spot exists on the female body.[725]
The menstrual cycles of women who live together do not tend to synchronize. A 1971 study made this claim, but subsequent research has not supported it.[728][729]
A person's hair and fingernails do not continue to grow after death. Rather, the skin dries and shrinks away from the bases of hairs and nails, giving the appearance of growth.[732]
Shaving does not cause terminal hair to grow back thicker or darker. This belief is thought to be due to the fact that hair that has never been cut has a tapered end, so after cutting, the base of the hair is blunt and appears thicker and feels coarser. That short hairs are less flexible than longer hairs contributes to this effect.[733]
Hair care products cannot actually "repair" split ends and damaged hair. They can prevent damage from occurring in the first place, and they can also smooth down the cuticle in a glue-like fashion so that it appears repaired, and generally make hair appear in better condition.[734]
Pulling or cutting a grey hair will not cause two grey hairs to grow in its place. It will only cause the one hair to grow back because only one hair can grow from each follicle.[735]
MC1R, the gene mostly responsible for red hair, is not becoming extinct, nor will the gene for blond hair do so, although both are recessivealleles. Redheads and blonds may become rarer but will not die out unless everyone who carries those alleles dies without passing their hair color genes on to their children.[736]
Acne is mostly caused by genetics, and is not caused by a lack of hygiene or eating fatty foods, though certain medication or a carbohydrate-rich diet may worsen it.[737]
Dandruff is not caused by poor hygiene, though infrequent hair-washing can make it more obvious. The exact causes of dandruff are uncertain, but they are believed to be mostly genetic and environmental factors.[738]
Inventions
James Watt did not invent the steam engine,[739] nor were his ideas on steam engine power inspired by a kettle lid pressured open by steam.[740] Watt improved upon the already commercially successful Newcomen atmospheric engine (invented in 1712) in the 1760s and 1770s, making certain improvements critical to its future usage, particularly the external condenser, increasing its efficiency, and later the mechanism for transforming reciprocating motion into rotary motion; his new steam engine later gained huge fame as a result.[741]
Although the guillotine was named after the French physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, he neither invented nor was executed with this device. He died peacefully on his own bed in 1814.[742]
Thomas Crapper did not invent the flush toilet.[743] A forerunner of the modern toilet was invented by the Elizabethan courtier Sir John Harington in the 16th century,[744] and in 1775 the Scottish mechanic Alexander Cumming developed and patented a design for a toilet with an S-trap and flushing mechanism.[745] Crapper, however, did much to increase the popularity of the flush toilet and introduced several innovations in the late 19th century, holding nine patents, including one for the floating ballcock.[746] The word crap is also not derived from his name (see the Words, phrases and languages section above).[747]
Thomas Edison did not invent the light bulb.[748] He did, however, develop the first practical light bulb in 1880 (employing a carbonized bamboo filament), shortly prior to Joseph Swan, who invented an even more efficient bulb in 1881 (which used a cellulose filament).
Henry Ford did not invent either the automobile or the assembly line. He did improve the assembly line process substantially, sometimes through his own engineering but more often through sponsoring the work of his employees, and he was the main person behind the introduction of the Model T, regarded as the first affordable automobile.[749]Karl Benz (co-founder of Mercedes-Benz) is credited with the invention of the first modern automobile,[750] and the assembly line has existed throughout history.
Al Gore never said that he had "invented" the Internet. What Gore actually said was, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet", in reference to his political work towards developing the Internet for widespread public use.[751] Gore was the original drafter of the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, which provided significant funding for supercomputing centers,[752] and this in turn led to upgrades of a major part of the already-existing early 1990s Internet backbone, the NSFNet,[753] and development of NCSA Mosaic, the browser that popularized the World Wide Web.[752] (See also: Al Gore and information technology)
In mathematics, the repeating decimal commonly written as 0.999... represents exactly the same quantity as the number one. Despite having the appearance of representing a smaller number, 0.999... is a symbol for the number 1 in exactly the same way that 0.333... is an equivalent notation for the number represented by the fraction 1⁄3.[762]
There is no evidence that the ancient Greeks deliberately designed the Parthenon to match the golden ratio.[763] The Parthenon was completed in 438 BCE, more than a century before the first recorded mention of the ratio by Euclid. Similarly, Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man makes no mention of the golden ratio in its text, although it describes many other proportions.[764]
The p-value is not the probability that the null hypothesis is true, or the probability that the alternative hypothesis is false; it is the probability of obtaining results at least as extreme as the results actually observed under the assumption that the null hypothesis was correct, which can indicate the incompatibility of results with the specific statistical model assumed in the null hypothesis.[765] This misconception, and similar ones like it, contributes to the common misuse of p-values in education and research.[765][766]
An illustration of the (incorrect) equal-transit-time explanation of aerofoil lift The lift force is not generated by the air taking the same time to travel above and below an aircraft's wing.[768] This misconception, sometimes called the equal transit-time fallacy, is widespread among textbooks and non-technical reference books, and even appears in pilot training materials. In fact, the air moving over the top of an aerofoil generating lift is always moving much faster than the equal transit theory would imply,[768] as described in the incorrect and correct explanations of lift force.
Blowing over a curved piece of paper does not demonstrate Bernoulli's principle. Although a common classroom experiment is often explained this way,[769] Bernoulli's principle only applies within a flow field, and the air above and below the paper is in different flow fields.[770] The paper rises because the air follows the curve of the paper and a curved streamline will develop pressure differences perpendicular to the airflow.[771][772]
The Coriolis effect does not cause water to consistently drain from basins in a clockwise/counter-clockwise direction depending on the hemisphere. The common myth often refers to the draining action of flush toilets and bathtubs. In fact, rotation is determined by whatever minor rotation is initially present at the time the water starts to drain, as the magnitude of the coriolis acceleration is negligibly small compared to the inertial acceleration of flow within a typical basin.[773]
Using a programmable thermostat's setback feature to limit heating or cooling in a temporarily unoccupied building does not waste as much energy as leaving the temperature constant. Using setback saves energy (5–15%) because heat transfer across the surface of the building is roughly proportional to the temperature difference between its inside and the outside.[778][779]
It is not possible for a person to completely drown in quicksand, as commonly depicted in fiction,[780] although sand entrapment in the nearshore of a body of water can be a drowning hazard as the tide rises.[781]
A small number of young children have eidetic memory, where they can recall an object with high precision for a few minutes after it is no longer present.[788] True photographic memory (the ability to remember endless images, particularly pages or numbers, with such a high precision that the image mimics a photo) has never been demonstrated to exist in any individual.[789] Many people have claimed to have a photographic memory, but those people have been shown to have high precision memories as a result of mnemonic devices rather than a natural capacity for detailed memory encoding.[790] There are rare cases of individuals with exceptional memory, but none of them have a memory that mimics that of a camera.
The phase of the moon does not influence fertility, cause a fluctuation in crime, or affect the stock market. There is no correlation between the lunar cycle and human biology or behavior. However, the increased amount of illumination during the full moon may account for increased epileptic episodes, motorcycle accidents, or sleep disorders.[791][792][793][794]
Dyslexia is a neurodevelopmental disorder of people who have at least average intelligence and who have difficulty in reading and writing that is not otherwise explained by low intelligence. Although some dyslexic people also have problems with letter or word reversal and mirror writing, letter reversal is common in children learning to read and write. It is not a defining symptom and does not form the basis of a diagnosis of dyslexia.[796][797]
Self-harm is not generally an attention-seeking behavior. People who engage in self-harm are typically very self-conscious of their wounds and scars and feel guilty about their behavior, leading them to go to great lengths to conceal it from others.[798] They may offer alternative explanations for their injuries, or conceal their scars with clothing.[799][800]
There is no evidence that a chemical imbalance or neurotransmitter deficiency is the sole factor in depression and other mental disorders, but rather a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors.[801][802]
Schizophrenia is characterized by continuous or relapsing episodes of psychosis. Major symptoms include hallucinations (typically hearing voices), delusions, paranoia, and disorganized thinking. Other symptoms include social withdrawal, decreased emotional expression, and apathy.[803] The term was coined from the Greek roots schizein and phrēn, "to split" and "mind", in reference to a "splitting of mental functions" seen in schizophrenia, not a splitting of the personality.[804] It does not involve split or multiple personalities—a split or multiple personality is dissociative identity disorder.[805]
Not all pedophiles commit child sexual abuse, and using the psychiatric definition of the word pedophile, not all child sexual abuse is committed by pedophiles. Pedophilia is a psychiatric disorder in which an adult or older adolescent experiences a primary or exclusive sexual attraction to prepubescent children. Child sexual abuse, also called child molestation, is a form of child abuse in which an adult or older adolescent uses a child for sexual stimulation. In general usage, a pedophile is any adult who is sexually attracted to or engages in sexual acts with a child.[806]
Brain
Although Phineas Gage's brain injuries, caused by a several-foot-long tamping rod driven completely through his skull, caused him to become temporarily disabled, fanciful descriptions of his "immoral behavior" in later life are without factual basis.[807]
Golgi-stained neurons in human hippocampal tissue. It is commonly believed that humans will not grow new brain cells, but research has shown that some neurons can reform in humans. Humans do not generate all of the brain cells they will ever have by the age of two years. Although this belief was held by medical experts until 1998, it is now understood that new neurons can be created after infancy in some parts of the brain into late adulthood.[809]
People do not use only 10% of their brains.[810][811] While it is true that a small minority of neurons in the brain are actively firing at any one time, a healthy human will normally use most of their brain over the course of a day, and the inactive neurons are important as well. The idea that activating 100% of the brain would allow someone to achieve their maximum potential and/or gain various psychic abilities is common in folklore and fiction,[811][812][813] but doing so in real life would likely result in a deadly seizure.[814][815] This misconception was attributed to William James, who apparently used the expression only metaphorically.[812]
An incorrectmap of the tongue showing zones that taste bitter (1), sour (2), salty (3) and sweet (4). Actually, all zones can sense all tastes, and there is also the taste of umami (not shown on picture). All different tastes can be detected on all parts of the tongue by taste buds,[818] with slightly increased sensitivities in different locations depending on the person; the tongue map showing the contrary is fallacious.[819]
Humans have more than the commonly cited five senses. The number of senses in various categorizations ranges from five to more than 20. In addition to sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing, which were the senses identified by Aristotle, humans can sense balance and acceleration (equilibrioception), pain (nociception), body and limb position (proprioception or kinesthetic sense), and relative temperature (thermoception).[824] Other senses sometimes identified are the sense of time, echolocation, itching, pressure, hunger, thirst, fullness of the stomach, need to urinate, need to defecate, and blood carbon dioxide (CO2) levels.[825][826]
Toilet waste is never intentionally jettisoned from an aircraft. All waste is collected in tanks and emptied into toilet waste vehicles.[828]Blue ice is caused by accidental leakage from the waste tank. Passenger train toilets, on the other hand, have indeed historically flushed onto the tracks; modern trains in most developed countries usually have retention tanks on board and therefore do not dispose of waste in such a manner.
Automotive batteries stored on a concrete floor do not discharge any faster than they would on other surfaces,[829] in spite of worry among Americans that concrete harms batteries.[830] Early batteries with porous, leaky cases may have been susceptible to moisture from floors, but for many years lead–acid car batteries have had impermeable polypropylene cases.[831] While most modern automotive batteries are sealed, and do not leak battery acid when properly stored and maintained,[832] the sulfuric acid in them can leak out and stain, etch, or corrode concrete floors if their cases crack or tip over or their vent-holes are breached by floods.[833]
^Rodriguez, Ashley (August 29, 2017). "Netflix was founded 20 years ago today because Reed Hastings was late returning a video". Quartz. Retrieved June 28, 2022. The real origin story wasn't as clean or concise, according to co-founder and former CEO Marc Randolph. He says Hastings began telling the tall Apollo 13 tale to give a sexy explanation for how Netflix worked. There was no late fee, no aha moment, just long commutes in Silicon Valley that the pair spent plotting their next venture around the time that Hastings's first business, Pure Software, merged with Atria, where Randolph worked, and sold to another company.
^Keating, Gina (September 24, 2013). "Prologue". Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America's Eyeballs. Portfolio. pp. 3–4. ISBN978-1-59184-659-8.
^Rhoads, Christopher (January 19, 2008). "The Hydrox Cookie Is Dead, and Fans Won't Get Over It". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved July 6, 2022. In college, when friends ridiculed her for preferring the cheaper knock-off Hydrox to the real thing, she did some research. Among her findings: Hydrox was created in 1908 by what would later become Sunshine Biscuits Inc. That was four years before the National Biscuit Co. (later called Nabisco) came up with the similar Oreo. Oreo was the knock-off. The Hydrox name came from combining the words hydrogen and oxygen, which Sunshine executives thought evoked purity. Others thought it sounded more like a laundry detergent.
^Kestenbaum, David; Smith, Robert (September 18, 2015). "Episode 652: The Hydrox Resurrection". Planet Money. NPR. Retrieved July 6, 2022. People thought of Hydrox as the Oreo knockoff, but they were not. Hydrox were the original sandwich cookie.
^ abKrampner, Jon (2013). "The Birth of Peanut Butter". Creamy and Crunchy: An Informal History of Peanut Butter, the All-American Food. Columbia University Press. p. 42. ISBN978-0-231-16233-3.
^Wheeling, Kate (January 2021). "A Brief History of Peanut Butter". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved June 24, 2022. North Americans weren't the first to grind peanuts—the Inca beat us to it by a few hundred years—but peanut butter reappeared in the modern world because of an American, the doctor, nutritionist and cereal pioneer John Harvey Kellogg, who filed a patent for a proto-peanut butter in 1895.
^Fox, William S.; Banner, Mae G. (April 1983). "Social and Economic Contexts of Folklore Variants: The Case of Potato Chip Legends". Western Folklore. 42 (2): 114–126. doi:10.2307/1499968. JSTOR1499968.
^McElwain, Aoife (June 17, 2019). "Did Tayto really invent cheese and onion crisps?". Irish Times. Retrieved June 23, 2022. One of the oldest known published recipes for crisps is by William Kitchiner, an optician who doubled up as a Georgian-era celebrity chef. His book, A Cook's Oracle, published in 1817, was a big hit in the UK and a young America. Kitchiner's recipe – Potatoes fried in Slices or Shavings – calls for slivers of potato fried in "lard or dripping" and "served with a very little salt sprinkled over them".
^Burhans, Dick (2008). "Creation Myths". Crunch!: A History of the Great American Potato Chip. University of Wisconsin Press. pp. 17–20. ISBN978-0299227708.
^
a. Paul Freedman, "Food Histories of the Middle Ages", in Kyri W. Claflin, Peter Scholliers, Writing Food History: A Global Perspective, ISBN1847888097, p. 24
b. Dalby, Andrew (2000). Dangerous Tastes: The Story of Spices. p. 156. ISBN978-0-520-23674-5.
c. Jotischky, Andrew (2011). A Hermit's Cookbook: Monks, Food and Fasting in the Middle Ages. p. 170. ISBN978-1-4411-5991-5.
d. Krondl, Michael (2007). The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice. p. 6. ISBN978-0-345-48083-5.
^Albert Jack, What Caesar Did for My Salad: Not to Mention the Earl's Sandwich, Pavlova's Meringue and Other Curious Stories Behind Our Favourite Food, 2010, ISBN978-1-84614-254-3, p. 141 at Google Books
^Di Placido, Dani (July 19, 2017). "The Evolution Of The Zombie". Forbes. Retrieved July 3, 2022. George A. Romero's first zombie film Night of the Living Dead is credited with popularizing the zombie, though it never actually uses that word. The "ghouls" in the film are mindless flesh-eaters that have little in common with the Haitian zombie other than rising from the grave.
^ abEschner, Kart (October 31, 2017). "Zombie Movies Are Never Really About Zombies". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved July 3, 2022. In the 1960s and 70s, filmmaker George Romero brought the zombie film into the mainstream with Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. The first of these was technically about "ghouls." Romero didn't start calling them "zombies" until his second film. But his now-iconic films helped to erase enslaved people from zombie history.
^Sisterson, Dennis (March 28, 2017). "Magic Wilderness: El Apóstol & Peludópolis". Skwigly. Retrieved June 22, 2022. As we all know, Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is usually cited as the first animated feature, but as most of us who read this site are no doubt aware, it wasn't. It was preceded by Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Ladislas Starevitch's The Tale of the Fox, and two features by the Argentinian animator Quirino Cristiani – all films which could scracely [sic] be more different from the Disney mode.
^Bendazzi, Giannalberto (2017). "The First Feature Length Animated Film in History". Twice the First: Quirino Cristiani and the Animated Feature Film. CRC Press. p. 36. ISBN978-1-351-37179-7. On the other hand, the movie was not widely successful, and appealed to a small portion of the population. It was strictly for a Buenos Aires audience: nobody in the provinces even saw it because it was not distributed there. And likewise, given the subject, it was not possible to export the film to other nations, not even to a close cousin similar to Uruguay.
^
a. Geoffrey K. Pullum's explanation in Language Log: The list of snow-referring roots to stick [suffixes] on isn't that long [in the Eskimoan language group]: qani- for a snowflake, apu- for snow considered as stuff lying on the ground and covering things up, a root meaning "slush", a root meaning "blizzard", a root meaning "drift", and a few others—very roughly the same number of roots as in English. Nonetheless, the number of distinct words you can derive from them is not 50, or 150, or 1500, or a million, but simply unbounded. Only stamina sets a limit. b. The seven most common English words for snow are snow, hail, sleet, ice, icicle, slush, and snowflake. English also has the related word glacier and the four common skiing terms pack, powder, crud, and crust, so one can say that at least 12 distinct words for snow exist in English.
^Krupnik, Igor et al. (2010) "Franz Boas and Inuktitut terminology for ice and snow: from the emergence of the field to the 'Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax'". in Krupnik et al. (2010). SIKU: Knowing our Ice: Documenting Inuit Sea-Ice knowledge and Use. New York, NY: Springer. pp.385–410.
^David Robson, New Scientist 2896, December 18 2012, Are there really 50 Eskimo words for snow?, "Yet Igor Krupnik, an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center in Washington DC believes that Boas was careful to include only words representing meaningful distinctions. Taking the same care with their own work, Krupnik and others have now charted the vocabulary of about 10 Inuit and Yupik dialects and conclude that there are indeed many more words for snow than in English (SIKU: Knowing Our Ice, 2010). Central Siberian Yupik has 40 such terms, whereas the Inuit dialect spoken in Nunavik, Quebec, has at least 53, including matsaaruti, wet snow that can be used to ice a sleigh's runners, and pukak, for the crystalline powder snow that looks like salt. For many of these dialects, the vocabulary associated with sea ice is even richer."
^
"Irregardless originated in dialectal American speech in the early 20th century... The most frequently repeated remark about it is that "there is no such word." There is such a word, however." Merriam Webster Dictionary "Definition of IRREGARDLESS". Archived from the original on May 8, 2014. Retrieved October 27, 2011.
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a. Harper, Douglas (2010). "Crap". Online Etymology Dictionary. Archived from the original on April 27, 2014. Retrieved June 17, 2011.
b. "Cropper". Dictionary of American Family Names. Oxford University Press. 2003. Archived from the original on November 2, 2011. Retrieved June 17, 2011.
^"Crap". American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Houghton Mifflin. 2001. Archived from the original on January 21, 2013. Retrieved June 17, 2011.
^ abc
a. Mikkelson, Barbara (July 8, 2007). "What the Fuck?". Snopes.com. Archived from the original on April 25, 2012. Retrieved June 17, 2011.
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^Sheidlower, Jesse (Autumn 1998). "Revising the F-Word". Verbatim: The Language Quarterly. 23 (4): 18–21.
^Henry Ansgar Kelly (September 1994). "Rule of Thumb and the Folklaw of the Husband's Stick". Journal of Legal Education. 44 (3): 341–65.
^Brians, Paul (2011). "Common Errors in English Usage – Ye". Common Errors in English Usage. Washington State University. Archived from the original on May 31, 2013. Retrieved June 24, 2011.
^Harper, Douglas (2001–2010). "Etymology Online". Online Etymology Dictionary. Online Etymology Dictionary. Archived from the original on April 27, 2014. Retrieved June 24, 2011.
^O'Conner & Kellerman 2009, p. 77: "The usual suggestion is that 'Xmas' is ... an attempt by the ungodly to x-out Jesus and banish religion from the holiday."
^Bratcher, Dennis (December 3, 2007). "The Origin of "Xmas"". CRI / Voice, Institute. Archived from the original on May 30, 2013. Retrieved June 10, 2011.
^Evans, Bergen (1962). Comfortable Words. New York City: Random House. All dictionaries now recognize "a Frankenstein" as any monstrous creation that threatens to destroy its creator.
^William Pryse-Phillips (2003). Companion to Clinical Neurology. Oxford University Press. ISBN0-19-515938-1., p. 611 defines the term as "Slight and transient improvement in spational[sic] reasoning skills detected in normal subjects as a result of exposure to the music of Mozart, specifically his sonata for two pianos (K448)."
^Bridgett, D.J.; Cuevas, J. (2000). "Effects of listening to Mozart and Bach on the performance of a mathematical test". Perceptual and Motor Skills. 90 (3 Pt 2): 1171–1175. doi:10.2466/pms.2000.90.3c.1171. PMID10939064. S2CID35762220.
^Jones, Martin H.; West, Stephen D.; Estell, David B. (2006). "The Mozart effect: Arousal, preference, and spatial performance". Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. S (1): 26–32. doi:10.1037/1931-3896.S.1.26.
^
Frédéric Chopin; Joseph Banowetz (2000). Piano works. Alfred Music Publishing. p. 6. ISBN978-0-7692-9854-2. Retrieved October 2, 2010.
^Maurice Hinson (2004). The Pianist's Dictionary. Indiana University Press. p. 114. ISBN978-0-253-21682-3. Retrieved October 2, 2010. This piece bears an erroneous nickname since the story long associated with this nickname presumes the pianist is supposed to play the piece in one minute. The word "minute" means small or little waltz.
^"Austria's far-right picks different flower for parliament's opening session". DW. September 11, 2017. Retrieved June 21, 2022. Flowers worn traditionally in jacket lapels at Austrian parliamentary openings got special attention Thursday when the Freedom Party of Austria's (FPÖ) 51 deputies — enlarged from 38 — sported edelweiss, the national flower featured in the 1965 hit movie "The Sound of Music."
^
a. Rafe, Simon. "Infallibility versus Impeccability". Saint Michael's Basic Training: Apologetics. Archived from the original on April 27, 2014. Retrieved June 17, 2011.
b. MacDonald, David; Bonocore, Mark. "Is the Pope Sinless?". The Pope, Bishop of Rome Catholic and Orthodox relations. CatholicBridge.com. Archived from the original on June 15, 2011. Retrieved June 17, 2011.
^Kennedy, Sam (December 2, 2005). "Dragon Quest vs. America". 1up. Archived from the original on July 28, 2012. Retrieved June 26, 2022. Predating Xbox 360 hysteria by years, several fans were mugged on their way home with their new prize, and the situation became so bad that it was brought before the Japanese Diet. Although tales of a law requiring Dragon Quest games only be released on the mornings of weekends or holidays are the stuff of urban legend, each new title is as highly anticipated as the launch of a new console.
^Walker, Matt (August 19, 2012). "Dragon Quest X Online: Mezameshi Itsutsu no Shuzoku". Nintendo World Report. Retrieved June 26, 2022. Its Thursday release is unheard of for a Dragon Quest game, which are generally released over the weekend so people don't take work off in droves to play them.
^ abFox, Mark (2012). "Space Invaders targets coins". World Coin News. 39 (2). Krause Publications: 35–37. Retrieved June 26, 2022.
^Stuart, Keith (July 12, 2011). "What does Hollywood want with old arcade games?". The Guardian. Retrieved June 29, 2022. Released in 1978 this early shooter pitted the player against waves of iconic alien craft; it became the most successful arcade game of the era and its huge popularity was widely credited with causing a coin shortage in Japan.
^
Weiss, Daniel. "Journeys of the Pyramid Builders". Archaeology (July/August 2022 ed.). Archaeological Institute of America. Retrieved August 14, 2022. Based on the contents of the papyri, Tallet believes that at least some workers in the time of Khufu were highly skilled and well rewarded for their labor, contradicting the popular notion that the Great Pyramid was built by masses of oppressed slaves.
^ abWatterson, Barbara (1997). "The Era of Pyramid-builders". The Egyptians. Blackwell. p. 63. Herodotus claimed that the Great Pyramid at Giza was built with the labour of 100,000 slaves working in three-monthly shifts, a charge that cannot be substantiated. Much of the non-skilled labour on the pyramids was undertaken by peasants working during the Inundation season when they could not farm their lands. In return for their services they were given rations of food, a welcome addition to the family diet.
^
Sparkes A.W. (1988). "Idiots, Ancient and Modern". Australian Journal of Political Science. 23: 101–02. doi:10.1080/00323268808402051.
^Winkler, Martin M. (2009). The Roman Salute: Cinema, History, Ideology. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. ISBN978-0-8142-0864-9. p. 55 The raised arm, first stretched out as a symbol of righteous fervor-as the Horatii evince it-and later as a symbol of political allegiance and religious-political unity between a people and its leader, becomes an important part of the iconography of new societies. In addition to its specific contemporary use the gesture comes to express, in a fashion that appears timeless and even mystical, an appeal to a higher being and to a heroic ancient past that had served as a model for most of Western civilization for centuries, although often in ways not supported by historical fact. David's Oath of the Horatii provided the starting point for an arresting gesture that progressed from oath-taking to what will become known as the Roman salute.
^
a. Ridley, R.T. (1986). "To Be Taken with a Pinch of Salt: The Destruction of Carthage". Classical Philology. 81 (2): 140–46. doi:10.1086/366973. JSTOR269786. S2CID161696751.: "a tradition in Roman history well known to most students"
b. Stevens, Susan T. (1988). "A Legend of the Destruction of Carthage". Classical Philology. 83 (1): 39–41. doi:10.1086/367078. JSTOR269635. S2CID161764925.
c. Visona, Paolo (1988). "Passing the Salt: On the Destruction of Carthage Again". Classical Philology. 83 (1): 41–42. doi:10.1086/367079. JSTOR269636. S2CID162289604.: "this story... had already gained widespread currency"
d. Warmington, B.H. (1988). "The Destruction of Carthage: A Retractatio". Classical Philology. 83 (4): 308–10. doi:10.1086/367123. JSTOR269510. S2CID162850949.: "the frequently repeated story"
^
a. Lindberg, David C. (2003). Lindberg, David C.; Numbers, Ronald L. (eds.). The Medieval Church Encounters the Classical Tradition: Saint Augustine, Roger Bacon, and the Handmaiden Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 8. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help) b. Grant, Edward (2001). God and Reason in the Middle Ages. Cambridge. p. 9.
c. Peters, Ted (2005). "Science and Religion". In Jones, Lindsay (ed.). Encyclopedia of Religion (2nd ed.). Thomson Gale. p. 8182.
d. Snyder, Christopher A. (1998). An Age of Tyrants: Britain and the Britons A.D. 400–600. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. pp. xiii–xiv. ISBN978-0-271-01780-8.
^"National Pasta Association". Archived from the original on March 20, 2012. article FAQs section "Who "invented" pasta?"; "The story that it was Marco Polo who imported noodles to Italy and thereby gave birth to the country's pasta culture is the most pervasive myth in the history of Italian food." (Dickie 2008, p. 48).
^
S. Serventi, F. Sabban La pasta. Storia e cultura di un cibo universale, VII. Economica Laterza 2004
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Schild, Wolfgang (2000). Die eiserne Jungfrau. Dichtung und Wahrheit (Schriftenreihe des Mittelalterlichen Kriminalmuseums Rothenburg o. d. Tauber Nr. 3). Rothenburg ob der Tauber.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
^
Keyser, Linda Migl (2008). "The Medieval Chastity Belt Unbuckled". In Harris, Stephen J.; Grigsby, Bryon L. (eds.). Misconceptions About the Middle Ages. Routledge.
^Van Duzer, Chet (June 4, 2014). "Bring on the Monsters and Marvels: Non-Ptolemaic Legends on Manuscript Maps of Ptolemy's Geography". Viator. 45 (2): 303–334. doi:10.1484/J.VIATOR.1.103923. ISSN0083-5897.
^Kim, Meeri (August 19, 2013). "Oldest globe to depict the New World may have been discovered". The Washington Post. Retrieved July 2, 2022. The only other map or globe on which this specific phrase appears is what can arguably be called the egg's twin: the copper Hunt-Lenox Globe, dated around 1510 and housed by the Rare Book Division of the New York Public Library.
^
Louise M. Bishop (2010). "The Myth of the Flat Earth". In Stephen Harris; Bryon L. Grigsby (eds.). Misconceptions about the Middle Ages. Routledge. ISBN978-1-135-98666-7. Retrieved January 26, 2014.
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Brooks, Rebecca Beatrice (July 22, 2018). "What Did the Pilgrims Wear?". History of Massachusetts Blog. Rebecca Beatrice Brooks. Retrieved November 10, 2019.
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Keener, Candace (September 2, 2008). "HowStuffWorks "Let Them Eat Cake"". History.howstuffworks.com. Archived from the original on September 4, 2012. Retrieved June 23, 2010.
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Crabtree, Steve (July 6, 1999). "New Poll Gauges Americans' General Knowledge Levels". Gallup News Service. Archived from the original on March 27, 2014. Retrieved January 13, 2011. Fifty-five percent say it commemorates the signing of the Declaration of Independence (this is a common misconception, and close to being accurate; July 4th is actually the date in 1776 when the Continental Congress approved the Declaration, which was officially signed on August 2nd.) Another 32 percent give a more general answer, saying that July 4th celebrates Independence Day.
^Ruderman, Wendy (September 1, 2012). "The Ice Pick Seems Antiquated, but It Still Shows Up on the Police Blotter". The New York Times. ISSN0362-4331. Retrieved September 3, 2022. One such weapon is the ice pick — often associated with the 1940 murder of the Russian Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky: He was killed with an ice pick's cousin, an ice ax, while he was in exile in Mexico, by an assassin who, acting on the orders of Joseph Stalin, crept up behind Trotsky and slammed the ice ax into his skull.
^ abcdBrown, Timothy S. (January 1, 2004). "Subcultures, Pop Music and Politics: Skinheads and "Nazi Rock" in England and Germany". Journal of Social History. 38 (1): 157–178. doi:10.1353/jsh.2004.0079. JSTOR3790031. S2CID42029805.
^Lambert, Chris (November 12, 2017). "'Black Skinhead': The politics of New Kanye". Daily Dot. Retrieved July 2, 2022. "Skinhead" was a term originally used to describe a 1960s British working-class subculture that revolved around fashion and music and that would heavily inspire the punk rock scene. While it has harmless roots, the skinhead movement fell into polemic politics. Nowadays, it's popularly associated with neo-Nazis, despite having split demographics of far-right, far-left, and apolitical.
^Cotter, John M. (1999). "Sounds of hate: White power rock and roll and the neo‐nazi skinhead subculture". Terrorism and Political Violence. 11 (2): 111–140. doi:10.1080/09546559908427509. ISSN0954-6553.
^Cendón, Sara Fernández (February 3, 2012). "Pruitt-Igoe 40 Years Later". American Institute of Architects. Archived from the original on March 14, 2014. Retrieved December 31, 2014. For example, Pruitt-Igoe is often cited as an AIA-award recipient, but the project never won any architectural awards.
^Bristol, Katharine (May 1991). "The Pruitt–Igoe Myth"(PDF). Journal of Architectural Education. 44 (3): 168. doi:10.1111/j.1531-314X.2010.01093.x. ISSN1531-314X. S2CID219542179. Archived from the original(PDF) on September 24, 2015. Retrieved December 31, 2014. Though it is commonly accorded the epithet 'award-winning,"' Pruitt-Igoe never won any kind of architectural prize. An earlier St. Louis housing project by the same team of architects, the John Cochran Garden Apartments, did win two architectural awards. At some point this prize seems to have been incorrectly attributed to Pruitt-Igoe
^Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam, 1998, ISBN978-0814751473
^Krause, Charles A. (December 17, 1978). "Jonestown Is an Eerie Ghost Town Now". Washington Post. Retrieved June 20, 2022. A pair of woman's eyelasses, a towel, a pair of shorts, packets of unopened Flavor-Aid lie scattered about waiting for the final cleanup that may one day return Jonestown to the tidy, if overcrowded, little community it once was.
^Krause, Charles A. (November 21, 1978). "Survivor: 'They Started with the Babies'". Washington Post. Retrieved June 20, 2022. "They started with the babies," administering a potion of Kool-aid mixed with cyanide, Odell Rhodes recalled yesterday when I revisited Jonestown to view the horrifying sight of 405 bodies – men, women and children, most of them grouped around the altar where Jones himself lay dead.
^
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^Brulliard, Karin (October 14, 2016). "Why French pigs say groin, Japanese bees say boon and American frogs say ribbit". Washington Post. Archived from the original on April 27, 2019. Retrieved June 25, 2022. Only American frogs are said to go "ribbit," and that's believed to be because early Hollywood producers used the ribbiting sound of the Pacific tree frog during night scenes.
^"Have You Heard the Calls from Cook County's 12 Frog and Toad Species?". Forest Preserves of Cook County. May 25, 2022. Retrieved June 25, 2022. Here's a bonus fact: you might notice that none of these species says, "ribbit." In fact, the "ribbit" call is unique to the Pacific tree frog, which lives along the Pacific coast, and, notably, in Hollywood, California, where the largest volume of early frog recordings took place.
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a. Chatfield, Matthew (January 4, 2008). "Some scientist once proved that bees can't fly...?".. naturenet.net. The Ranger's Blog.
b. Ivars Peterson (September 13, 2004). "Flight of the Bumblebee". Ivars Peterson's MathTrek. Mathematical Association of America. Retrieved November 18, 2011.
c. Dickinson, Michael (June 2001). "Solving the Mystery of Insect Flight". Scientific American. 284 (6): 48–50, 53–57. Bibcode:2001SciAm.284f..48D. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0601-48. JSTOR26059248. PMID11396342. a 1934 book by entomologist Antoine Magnan... refers to a calculation by his assistant André Sainte-Laguë, who was an engineer. The conclusion was presumably based on the fact that the maximum possible lift produced by aircraft wings as small as a bumblebee's wings and traveling as slowly as a bee in flight would be much less than the weight of a bee.
^Cleveland, L.R.; Hall, S.K.; Sanders, E.P.; Collier, J. (1934). "The Wood-Feeding Roach Cryptocercus, its protozoa, and the symbiosis between protozoa and roach". Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 17 (2): 185–382. doi:10.1093/aesa/28.2.216.
^McKittrick, F.A. (1965). "A contribution to the understanding of cockroach-termite affinities". Annals of the Entomological Society of America. 58 (1): 18–22. doi:10.1093/aesa/58.1.18. PMID5834489.
^Ware, J.L.; Litman, J.; Klass, K.-D.; Spearman, L.A. (2008). "Relationships among the major lineages of Dictyoptera: the effect of outgroup selection on dictyopteran tree topology". Systematic Entomology. 33 (3): 429–450. doi:10.1111/j.1365-3113.2008.00424.x. S2CID86777253.
^Kruszelnicki, Karl S. (February 23, 2006). "Cockroaches and Radiation". ABC Science. Retrieved November 24, 2015.
^
a. Gerard, John (1597). "Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes". London: John Norton. pp. 612–14. Archived from the original on April 27, 2014. Retrieved January 7, 2021. Popular botany book in 17th century England.
b. Hangarter, Roger P. "Solar tracking: sunflower plants". Plants-In-Motion website. Indiana University. Archived from the original on October 19, 2013. Retrieved August 22, 2012. Many people are under the misconception that the flower heads of the cultivated sunflower (Helianthus annuus) track the sun... Immature flower buds of the sunflower do exhibit solar tracking and on sunny days the buds will track the sun across the sky from east to west... However, as the flower bud matures and blossoms, the stem stiffens and the flower becomes fixed facing the eastward direction. c. Polikarpov, G.G. (1978). "Sunflower's blooming floscule is a compass". Nature. 272 (5649): 122. Bibcode:1978Natur.272..122P. doi:10.1038/272122c0.
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^Benton, Michael J. (2004). "Origin and relationships of Dinosauria". In Weishampel, David B.; Dodson, Peter; Osmólska, Halszka (eds.). The Dinosauria (2nd ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 7–19. ISBN978-0-520-24209-8.
^Cleal, C. J. & Thomas, B. A. (2005). "Palaeozoic tropical rainforests and their effect on global climates: is the past the key to the present?" Geobiology, 3, p. 13-31.
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^Curtin, Ciara (February 2007). "Fact or Fiction?: Glass Is a (Supercooled) Liquid". Scientific American. Archived from the original on December 14, 2013. Glass, however, is actually neither a liquid—supercooled or otherwise—nor a solid. It is an amorphous solid—a state somewhere between those two states of matter. And yet glass's liquidlike properties are not enough to explain the thicker-bottomed windows, because glass atoms move too slowly for changes to be visible.
^ abcHalem, Henry (May 30, 1998). "Does Glass Flow". Glassnotes.com. Archived from the original on October 22, 2013. Retrieved August 29, 2009.
^Beckett, Andy (November 25, 2009). "The dark side of the internet". The Guardian. Retrieved August 8, 2022. While a "darknet" is an online network such as Freenet that is concealed from non-users, with all the potential for transgressive behaviour that implies, much of "the deep web", spooky as it sounds, consists of unremarkable consumer and research data that is beyond the reach of search engines.
^Begley, Sharon (August 13, 2007). "The Truth About Denial". Newsweek. Archived from the original on October 21, 2007. (MSNBC single page version, archived 20 August 2007) "If you think those who have long challenged the mainstream scientific findings about global warming recognize that the game is over, think again. ... outside Hollywood, Manhattan and other habitats of the chattering classes, the denial machine is running at full throttle—and continuing to shape both government policy and public opinion. Since the late 1980s, this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change. Through advertisements, op-eds, lobbying and media attention, greenhouse doubters (they hate being called deniers) argued first that the world is not warming; measurements indicating otherwise are flawed, they said. Then they claimed that any warming is natural, not caused by human activities. Now they contend that the looming warming will be minuscule and harmless. 'They patterned what they did after the tobacco industry,' says former senator Tim Wirth."
^Hata, M.; Uyeshima, M. (March 31, 2015). "Temperature and melt fraction distributions in a mantle wedge determined from the electrical conductivity structure: Application to one nonvolcanic and two volcanic regions in the Kyushu subduction zone, Japan". Geophysical Research Letters. 42 (8): 2709–2717. Bibcode:2015GeoRL..42.2709H. doi:10.1002/2015GL063308. S2CID128585826.
^
a. "Ask an Astrophysicist". NASA. Archived from the original on June 4, 2012. If you don't try to hold your breath, exposure to space for half a minute or so is unlikely to produce permanent injury. Holding your breath is likely to damage your lungs, ... but theory predicts—and animal experiments confirm—that otherwise, exposure to vacuum causes no immediate injury. You do not explode. Your blood does not boil. You do not freeze. You do not instantly lose consciousness b. "Exploding Body in Vacuum". ABC Science. April 6, 2005. Archived from the original on June 4, 2012. ...will we humans explode in the full vacuum of space, as urban legends claim? The answer is that we won't explode, and if the exposure is short enough, we can even survive.
^
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^Whelan, Corey (September 23, 2019). "Do Men and Women Have the Same Number of Ribs?". Healthline. Retrieved June 5, 2022. There's a commonly held falsehood that men have one less rib than women. This myth may have its roots in the Bible and the creation story about Eve being made from one of Adam's ribs.
^Dresden, Danielle (March 12, 2020). "How many ribs do humans have? Men, women, and anatomy". Medical News Today. Retrieved June 5, 2022. Although many people might think that males have fewer ribs than females — most likely sparked by the biblical story of Adam and Eve — there is no factual evidence.
^Corr CA (October 23, 2018). "The 'five stages' in coping with dying and bereavement: strengths, weaknesses and some alternatives". Mortality. 24 (4): 405–417. doi:10.1080/13576275.2018.1527826. S2CID149545381.
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^Mourtzoukou EG, Falagas ME (September 2007). "Exposure to cold and respiratory tract infections". The International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease. 11 (9): 938–43. PMID17705968.
^Arroll, B; Kenealy, T (October 21, 2002). "Antibiotics for the common cold and acute purulent rhinitis". The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (3): CD000247. doi:10.1002/14651858.CD000247. PMID12137610.
^Blaser, Martin J.; Melby, Melissa K.; Lock, Margaret; Nichter, Mark (February 2021). "Accounting for variation in and overuse of antibiotics among humans". BioEssays. 43 (2): 2000163. doi:10.1002/bies.202000163. PMID33410142. S2CID230811912.
^Spellman, Frank R; Price-Bayer, Joni. (2010). In Defense of Science: Why Scientific Literacy Matters. The Scarecrow Press. p. 81. ISBN978-1-60590-735-2 "There is no scientific evidence that crystal healing has any effect. It has been called a pseudoscience. Pleasant feelings or the apparent successes of crystal healing can be attributed to the placebo effect or cognitive bias—a believer wanting it to be true."
^Regal, Brian. (2009). Pseudoscience: A Critical Encyclopedia. Greenwood. p. 51. ISBN978-0-313-35507-3
^Nicolia, Alessandro; Manzo, Alberto; Veronesi, Fabio; Rosellini, Daniele (2013). "An overview of the last 10 years of genetically engineered crop safety research"(PDF). Critical Reviews in Biotechnology. 34 (1): 77–88. doi:10.3109/07388551.2013.823595. PMID24041244. S2CID9836802. We have reviewed the scientific literature on GE crop safety for the last 10 years that catches the scientific consensus matured since GE plants became widely cultivated worldwide, and we can conclude that the scientific research conducted so far has not detected any significant hazard directly connected with the use of GM crops.
The literature about Biodiversity and the GE food/feed consumption has sometimes resulted in animated debate regarding the suitability of the experimental designs, the choice of the statistical methods or the public accessibility of data. Such debate, even if positive and part of the natural process of review by the scientific community, has frequently been distorted by the media and often used politically and inappropriately in anti-GE crops campaigns.
^"State of Food and Agriculture 2003–2004. Agricultural Biotechnology: Meeting the Needs of the Poor. Health and environmental impacts of transgenic crops". Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Retrieved August 30, 2019. Currently available transgenic crops and foods derived from them have been judged safe to eat and the methods used to test their safety have been deemed appropriate. These conclusions represent the consensus of the scientific evidence surveyed by the ICSU (2003) and they are consistent with the views of the World Health Organization (WHO, 2002). These foods have been assessed for increased risks to human health by several national regulatory authorities (inter alia, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, the United Kingdom and the United States) using their national food safety procedures (ICSU). To date no verifiable untoward toxic or nutritionally deleterious effects resulting from the consumption of foods derived from genetically modified crops have been discovered anywhere in the world (GM Science Review Panel). Many millions of people have consumed foods derived from GM plants – mainly maize, soybean and oilseed rape – without any observed adverse effects (ICSU).
^Ronald, Pamela (May 1, 2011). "Plant Genetics, Sustainable Agriculture and Global Food Security". Genetics. 188 (1): 11–20. doi:10.1534/genetics.111.128553. PMC3120150. PMID21546547. There is broad scientific consensus that genetically engineered crops currently on the market are safe to eat. After 14 years of cultivation and a cumulative total of 2 billion acres planted, no adverse health or environmental effects have resulted from commercialization of genetically engineered crops (Board on Agriculture and Natural Resources, Committee on Environmental Impacts Associated with Commercialization of Transgenic Plants, National Research Council and Division on Earth and Life Studies 2002). Both the U.S. National Research Council and the Joint Research Centre (the European Union's scientific and technical research laboratory and an integral part of the European Commission) have concluded that there is a comprehensive body of knowledge that adequately addresses the food safety issue of genetically engineered crops (Committee on Identifying and Assessing Unintended Effects of Genetically Engineered Foods on Human Health and National Research Council 2004; European Commission Joint Research Centre 2008). These and other recent reports conclude that the processes of genetic engineering and conventional breeding are no different in terms of unintended consequences to human health and the environment (European Commission Directorate-General for Research and Innovation 2010).
^But see also:
Domingo, José L.; Bordonaba, Jordi Giné (2011). "A literature review on the safety assessment of genetically modified plants"(PDF). Environment International. 37 (4): 734–742. doi:10.1016/j.envint.2011.01.003. PMID21296423. In spite of this, the number of studies specifically focused on safety assessment of GM plants is still limited. However, it is important to remark that for the first time, a certain equilibrium in the number of research groups suggesting, on the basis of their studies, that a number of varieties of GM products (mainly maize and soybeans) are as safe and nutritious as the respective conventional non-GM plant, and those raising still serious concerns, was observed. Moreover, it is worth mentioning that most of the studies demonstrating that GM foods are as nutritional and safe as those obtained by conventional breeding, have been performed by biotechnology companies or associates, which are also responsible of commercializing these GM plants. Anyhow, this represents a notable advance in comparison with the lack of studies published in recent years in scientific journals by those companies.
Krimsky, Sheldon (2015). "An Illusory Consensus behind GMO Health Assessment". Science, Technology, & Human Values. 40 (6): 883–914. doi:10.1177/0162243915598381. S2CID40855100. I began this article with the testimonials from respected scientists that there is literally no scientific controversy over the health effects of GMOs. My investigation into the scientific literature tells another story.
And contrast:
Panchin, Alexander Y.; Tuzhikov, Alexander I. (January 14, 2016). "Published GMO studies find no evidence of harm when corrected for multiple comparisons". Critical Reviews in Biotechnology. 37 (2): 213–217. doi:10.3109/07388551.2015.1130684. ISSN0738-8551. PMID26767435. S2CID11786594. Here, we show that a number of articles some of which have strongly and negatively influenced the public opinion on GM crops and even provoked political actions, such as GMO embargo, share common flaws in the statistical evaluation of the data. Having accounted for these flaws, we conclude that the data presented in these articles does not provide any substantial evidence of GMO harm.
The presented articles suggesting possible harm of GMOs received high public attention. However, despite their claims, they actually weaken the evidence for the harm and lack of substantial equivalency of studied GMOs. We emphasize that with over 1783 published articles on GMOs over the last 10 years it is expected that some of them should have reported undesired differences between GMOs and conventional crops even if no such differences exist in reality.
andYang, Y.T.; Chen, B. (2016). "Governing GMOs in the USA: science, law and public health". Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture. 96 (4): 1851–1855. doi:10.1002/jsfa.7523. PMID26536836. It is therefore not surprising that efforts to require labeling and to ban GMOs have been a growing political issue in the USA (citing Domingo and Bordonaba, 2011). Overall, a broad scientific consensus holds that currently marketed GM food poses no greater risk than conventional food... Major national and international science and medical associations have stated that no adverse human health effects related to GMO food have been reported or substantiated in peer-reviewed literature to date.
Despite various concerns, today, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the World Health Organization, and many independent international science organizations agree that GMOs are just as safe as other foods. Compared with conventional breeding techniques, genetic engineering is far more precise and, in most cases, less likely to create an unexpected outcome.
^"Statement by the AAAS Board of Directors On Labeling of Genetically Modified Foods"(PDF). American Association for the Advancement of Science. October 20, 2012. Retrieved August 30, 2019. The EU, for example, has invested more than €300 million in research on the biosafety of GMOs. Its recent report states: "The main conclusion to be drawn from the efforts of more than 130 research projects, covering a period of more than 25 years of research and involving more than 500 independent research groups, is that biotechnology, and in particular GMOs, are not per se more risky than e.g. conventional plant breeding technologies." The World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the British Royal Society, and every other respected organization that has examined the evidence has come to the same conclusion: consuming foods containing ingredients derived from GM crops is no riskier than consuming the same foods containing ingredients from crop plants modified by conventional plant improvement techniques.
^"ISAAA Summary of AMA Report on Genetically Modified Crops and Foods". ISAAA. January 2001. Retrieved August 30, 2019. A report issued by the scientific council of the American Medical Association (AMA) says that no long-term health effects have been detected from the use of transgenic crops and genetically modified foods, and that these foods are substantially equivalent to their conventional counterparts.
^"Restrictions on Genetically Modified Organisms: United States. Public and Scholarly Opinion". Library of Congress. June 30, 2015. Retrieved August 30, 2019. Several scientific organizations in the US have issued studies or statements regarding the safety of GMOs indicating that there is no evidence that GMOs present unique safety risks compared to conventionally bred products. These include the National Research Council, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Medical Association. Groups in the US opposed to GMOs include some environmental organizations, organic farming organizations, and consumer organizations. A substantial number of legal academics have criticized the US's approach to regulating GMOs.
^National Academies Of Sciences, Engineering; Division on Earth Life Studies; Board on Agriculture Natural Resources; Committee on Genetically Engineered Crops: Past Experience Future Prospects (2016). Genetically Engineered Crops: Experiences and Prospects. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (US). p. 149. doi:10.17226/23395. ISBN978-0-309-43738-7. PMID28230933. Retrieved August 30, 2019. Overall finding on purported adverse effects on human health of foods derived from GE crops: On the basis of detailed examination of comparisons of currently commercialized GE with non-GE foods in compositional analysis, acute and chronic animal toxicity tests, long-term data on health of livestock fed GE foods, and human epidemiological data, the committee found no differences that implicate a higher risk to human health from GE foods than from their non-GE counterparts.
^ ab
Compare: Zeratsky, Katherine (April 21, 2012). "Do detox diets offer any health benefits?". Mayo Clinic. Archived from the original on December 16, 2019. Retrieved May 9, 2015. [...T]here's little evidence that detox diets actually remove toxins from the body. Indeed, the kidneys and liver are generally quite effective at filtering and eliminating most ingested toxins.
^
a. Pinnock, CB; Graham, NM; Mylvaganam, A; Douglas, RM (1990). "Relationship between milk intake and mucus production in adult volunteers challenged with rhinovirus-2". The American Review of Respiratory Disease. 141 (2): 352–56. doi:10.1164/ajrccm/141.2.352. PMID2154152.
b. Patricia Queen Samour; Kathy King Helm (2005). Handbook of pediatric nutrition. Jones & Bartlett Learning. ISBN978-0-7637-8356-3.
^ aba. Valtin, Heinz (2002). ""Drink at least eight glasses of water a day." Really? Is there scientific evidence for "8 × 8"?". American Journal of Physiology. Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology. 283 (5): R993–R1004. doi:10.1152/ajpregu.00365.2002. PMID12376390.
b. "Über den Durst" (in German). Die Zeit. Retrieved April 7, 2012.
c. "Muss ich wirklich 3 Liter Wasser am Tag trinken" (in German). Retrieved April 7, 2012.
^
Fullerton-Smith, Jill (2007). The Truth About Food. Bloomsbury. pp. 115–17. ISBN978-0-7475-8685-2. Most parents assume that children plus sugary foods equals raucous and uncontrollable behaviour. ... according to nutrition experts, the belief that children experience a 'sugar high' is a myth.
^
Weisberger, L; Jamieson, B (July 2009). "Clinical inquiries: How can you help prevent a recurrence of diverticulitis?". The Journal of Family Practice. 58 (7): 381–82. PMID19607778.
^Messina, Virginia; Reed Mangles; Mark Messina (2004). The dietitian's guide to vegetarian diets. Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett Publishers. ISBN978-0-7637-3241-7.
^Zampelas A, Magriplis E (February 2020). "Dietary patterns and risk of cardiovascular diseases: a review of the evidence". Proc Nutr Soc (Review). 79 (1): 68–75. doi:10.1017/S0029665119000946. PMID31250769. S2CID195757764. Few studies have reported the health benefits of vegan diets and therefore no conclusive evidence can be proposed
^Perlman, Sally E.; Nakajyma, Steven T.; Hertweck, S. Paige (2004). Clinical protocols in pediatric and adolescent gynecology. Parthenon. p. 131. ISBN978-1-84214-199-1.
^Harris, Amy L.; Vitzthum, Virginia J. (2013). "Darwin's Legacy: An Evolutionary View of Women's Reproductive and Sexual Functioning". Journal of Sex Research. 50 (3–4): 207–46. doi:10.1080/00224499.2012.763085. PMID23480070. S2CID30229421.
^
Silverman, Jacob (September 9, 2007). "Are redheads going extinct?". HowStuffWorks. Archived from the original on December 3, 2012. Retrieved July 15, 2011.
^a. "How to treat dandruff". American Academy of Dermatology. Retrieved July 2, 2022. Many people believe that dandruff is caused by poor hygiene, but this is not true. b. Rosenblum, Katie (September 25, 2019). "Dandruff: What It Is and What to Do About It". Cedars-Sinai. Retrieved July 2, 2022. It's often associated with poor hygiene, but that's a misconception—no one's really sure what causes it. c. "Dandruff". NHS. October 18, 2017. Retrieved July 2, 2022. Dandruff is not caused by poor hygiene, although it may be more obvious if you do not wash your hair regularly.
^
a. Jesse Galef (August 29, 2011). "Lies and Debunked Legends about the Golden Ratio". Archived from the original on April 27, 2014. Retrieved April 10, 2013.
b. "Two other beliefs about [the golden ratio] are often mentioned in magazines and books: that the ancient Greeks believed it was the proportion of the rectangle the eye finds most pleasing and that they accordingly incorporated the rectangle in many of their buildings, including the famous Parthenon. These two equally persistent beliefs are likewise assuredly false and, in any case, are completely without any evidence." Devlin, Keith (2008). The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-Century Letter that Made the World Modern. Basic Books. p. 35.
^
a. Donald E. Simanek. "Fibonacci Flim-Flam". Archived from the original on February 1, 2010. Retrieved April 9, 2013.
b. Devlin, Keith (May 2007). "The Myth That Will Not Go Away". Archived from the original on July 1, 2013. Retrieved April 10, 2013. Part of the process of becoming a mathematics writer is, it appears, learning that you cannot refer to the golden ratio without following the first mention by a phrase that goes something like 'which the ancient Greeks and others believed to have divine and mystical properties.' Almost as compulsive is the urge to add a second factoid along the lines of 'Leonardo Da Vinci believed that the human form displays the golden ratio.' There is not a shred of evidence to back up either claim, and every reason to assume they are both false. Yet both claims, along with various others in a similar vein, live on.
^ ab"Incorrect Lift Theory". grc.nasa.gov. NASA Glenn Research Center. July 28, 2008. Archived from the original on April 27, 2014. Retrieved January 13, 2011. (Java applet).
^a. "This occurs because of Bernoulli's principle – fast-moving air has lower pressure than non-moving air". Make Magazine. Archived from the original on January 3, 2013. Retrieved September 5, 2012.
b. "Paper Lift". Physics Force. University of Minnesota. Archived from the original on November 12, 2020. Retrieved January 7, 2021. ... When the demonstrator holds the paper in front of his mouth and blows across the top, he is creating an area of faster-moving air. The slower-moving air under the paper now has higher pressure, thus pushing the paper up, towards the area of lower pressure..
c. "Educational Packet"(PDF). Tall Ships Festival: Channel Islands Harbor. Archived from the original(PDF) on December 3, 2013. Retrieved June 25, 2012. Bernoulli's Principle states that faster moving air has lower pressure... You can demonstrate Bernoulli's Principle by blowing over a piece of paper held horizontally across your lips."
^
a. Craig, Gale M. "Physical Principles of Winged Flight"(PDF). If the lift in figure A were caused by "Bernoulli principle," then the paper in figure B should droop further when air is blown beneath it. However, as shown, it raises when the upward pressure gradient in downward-curving flow adds to atmospheric pressure at the paper lower surface. b. Babinsky, Holger (2003). "How Do Wings Work". Physics Education. 38 (6): 497–503. Bibcode:2003PhyEd..38..497B. doi:10.1088/0031-9120/38/6/001. S2CID1657792. Retrieved January 7, 2021. In fact, the pressure in the air blown out of the lungs is equal to that of the surrounding air... Blowing over a piece of paper does not demonstrate Bernoulli's equation. While it is true that a curved paper lifts when flow is applied on one side, this is not because air is moving at different speeds on the two sides... It is false to make a connection between the flow on the two sides of the paper using Bernoulli's equation. c. Eastwell, Peter (2007). "Bernoulli? Perhaps, but What About Viscosity?"(PDF). The Science Education Review. 6 (1). ...air does not have a reduced lateral pressure (or static pressure...) simply because it is caused to move, the static pressure of free air does not decrease as the speed of the air increases, it misunderstanding Bernoulli's principle to suggest that this is what it tells us, and the behavior of the curved paper is explained by other reasoning than Bernoulli's principle. ... An explanation based on Bernoulli's principle is not applicable to this situation, because this principle has nothing to say about the interaction of air masses having different speeds... Also, while Bernoulli's principle allows us to compare fluid speeds and pressures along a single streamline and... along two different streamlines that originate under identical fluid conditions, using Bernoulli's principle to compare the air above and below the curved paper in Figure 1 is nonsensical; in this case, there aren't any streamlines at all below the paper! d. Raskin, Jef. "Coanda Effect: Understanding Why Wings Work". Make a strip of writing paper about 5 cm X 25 cm. Hold it in front of your lips so that it hangs out and down making a convex upward surface. When you blow across the top of the paper, it rises. Many books attribute this to the lowering of the air pressure on top solely to the Bernoulli effect. Now use your fingers to form the paper into a curve that it is slightly concave upward along its whole length and again blow along the top of this strip. The paper now bends downward...an often-cited experiment which is usually taken as demonstrating the common explanation of lift does not do so... e. Auerbach, David (2000). "Why Aircraft Fly". European Journal of Physics. 21 (4): 289. Bibcode:2000EJPh...21..289A. doi:10.1088/0143-0807/21/4/302. S2CID250821727. The well-known demonstration of the phenomenon of lift by means of lifting a page cantilevered in one's hand by blowing horizontally along it is probably more a demonstration of the forces inherent in the Coanda effect than a demonstration of Bernoulli's law; for, here, an air jet issues from the mouth and attaches to a curved (and, in this case pliable) surface. The upper edge is a complicated vortex-laden mixing layer and the distant flow is quiescent, so that Bernoulli's law is hardly applicable. f. Smith, Norman F. (November 1972). "Bernoulli and Newton in Fluid Mechanics". The Physics Teacher. 10 (8): 451–455. Bibcode:1972PhTea..10..451S. doi:10.1119/1.2352317. Millions of children in science classes are being asked to blow over curved pieces of paper and observe that the paper "lifts"... They are then asked to believe that Bernoulli's theorem is responsible... Unfortunately, the "dynamic lift" involved...is not properly explained by Bernoulli's theorem.
^a. Babinsky, Holger (2003). "How Do Wings Work". Physics Education. 38 (6): 497–503. Bibcode:2003PhyEd..38..497B. doi:10.1088/0031-9120/38/6/001. S2CID1657792. Retrieved January 7, 2021. ...if a streamline is curved, there must be a pressure gradient across the streamline, with the pressure increasing in the direction away from the centre of curvature. b. Smith, Norman F. (April 1973). "Bernoulli, Newton, and Dynamic Lift Part II*: Bernoulli or Newton?". School Science and Mathematics. 73 (4): 327–335. doi:10.1111/j.1949-8594.1973.tb09040.x. The curved paper turns the stream of air downward, and this action produces the lift reaction that lifts the paper. c. "AERONAUTICS: An Educator's Guide with Activities in Science, Mathematics, and Technology Education"(PDF). NASA. p. 26. Retrieved January 7, 2021. The curved surface of the tongue creates unequal air pressure and a lifting action. ... Lift is caused by air moving over a curved surface.
^
a. Anderson, David F.; Eberhardt, Scott (2000). Understanding Flight. p. 229. ISBN978-0-07-138666-1 – via Google Books. Demonstrations" of Bernoulli's principle are often given as demonstrations of the physics of lift. They are truly demonstrations of lift, but certainly not of Bernoulli's principle. b. Feil, Max. The Aeronautics File. As an example, take the misleading experiment most often used to "demonstrate" Bernoulli's principle. Hold a piece of paper so that it curves over your finger, then blow across the top. The paper will rise. However most people do not realize that the paper would NOT rise if it was flat, even though you are blowing air across the top of it at a furious rate. Bernoulli's principle does not apply directly in this case. This is because the air on the two sides of the paper did not start out from the same source. The air on the bottom is ambient air from the room, but the air on the top came from your mouth where you actually increased its speed without decreasing its pressure by forcing it out of your mouth. As a result the air on both sides of the flat paper actually has the same pressure, even though the air on the top is moving faster. The reason that a curved piece of paper does rise is that the air from your mouth speeds up even more as it follows the curve of the paper, which in turn lowers the pressure according to Bernoulli.
^Pressure melting and ice skating S. C. Colbeck American Journal of Physics 63, 888 (1995); "Pressure melting cannot be responsible for the low friction of ice. The pressure needed to reach the melting temperature is above the compressive failure stress... https://aapt.scitation.org/doi/10.1119/1.18028
^"Explaining Ice: The Answers Are Slippery" By KENNETH CHANG Feb. 21, 2006 The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/science/21ice.html "According to the frequently cited if incorrect explanation of why ice is slippery under an ice skate, the pressure exerted along the blade lowers the melting temperature of the top layer of ice, the ice melts and the blade glides on a thin layer of water that refreezes to ice as soon as the blade passes... But the explanation fails... because the pressure-melting effect is small."
^Martens, R.; Kelly, I. W.; Saklofske, D. H. (December 1988). "Lunar Phase and Birthrate: A 50-Year Critical Review". Psychological Reports. 63 (3): 923–934. doi:10.2466/pr0.1988.63.3.923. PMID3070616. S2CID34184527.
^Rotton, James; Kelly, I. W. (1985). "Much ado about the full moon: A meta-analysis of lunar-lunacy research". Psychological Bulletin. 97 (2): 286–306. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.97.2.286. PMID3885282.
^Kelly, Ivan; Rotton, James; Culver, Roger (1986), "The Moon Was Full and Nothing Happened: A Review of Studies on the Moon and Human Behavior", Skeptical Inquirer, 10 (2): 129–43. Reprinted in The Hundredth Monkey – and other paradigms of the paranormal, edited by Kendrick Frazier, Prometheus Books. Revised and updated in The Outer Edge: Classic Investigations of the Paranormal, edited by Joe Nickell, Barry Karr, and Tom Genoni, 1996, CSICOP.
^Stahl, S. M. (2021). Stahl's essential psychopharmacology: Neuroscientific basis and practical applications (5th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 264. ISBN978-1-108-98585-7.
^ abRadford, Benjamin (March–April 1999). "The Ten-Percent Myth". Skeptical Inquirer. ISSN0194-6730. Archived from the original on October 30, 2013. Retrieved April 15, 2009. It's the old myth heard time and again about how people use only ten percent of their brains
^ abBeyerstein, Barry L. (1999). "Whence Cometh the Myth that We Only Use 10% of our Brains?". In Sergio Della Sala (ed.). Mind Myths: Exploring Popular Assumptions About the Mind and Brain. Wiley. pp. 3–24. ISBN978-0-471-98303-3.
^Twycross, Alison (2014). Managing pain in children : a clinical guide for nurses and healthcare professionals. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell. p. 7. ISBN978-0-470-67054-5.
^Cerretani, Jessica (Spring 2010). "Extra Sensory Perceptions". Harvard Medicine. Harvard College. Archived from the original on February 11, 2012. Retrieved January 13, 2011.
O'Conner, Patricia T.; Kellerman, Stewart (2009). Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language. New York: Random House. ISBN978-1-4000-6660-5.
Varasdi, J. Allen (1996). Myth Information: More Than 590 Popular Misconceptions, Fallacies, and Misbeliefs Explained!. Ballantine Books. ISBN978-0-345-41049-8.
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