There is nothing more human than being confidently incorrect. We’ve all been guilty of it, giving answers that are completely wrong, or casually citing statistics, facts, and figures that have no bearing on reality.So one netizen wanted to set the record straight andasked the internetfor its favorite often repeated fact that is actually false. People shared all sorts of information that might send you reeling when you realize something you’ve firmly believed as true is a lie. So get comfortable as you scroll through and be sure to upvote your favorites and comment your thoughts below.This post may includeaffiliate links.
There is nothing more human than being confidently incorrect. We’ve all been guilty of it, giving answers that are completely wrong, or casually citing statistics, facts, and figures that have no bearing on reality.
So one netizen wanted to set the record straight andasked the internetfor its favorite often repeated fact that is actually false. People shared all sorts of information that might send you reeling when you realize something you’ve firmly believed as true is a lie. So get comfortable as you scroll through and be sure to upvote your favorites and comment your thoughts below.
This post may includeaffiliate links.
That you can sweat out “toxins”.You liver and kidney remove toxins from your body. Your sweat glands are physically incapable of “removing toxins”
People in the Middle Ages thought the Earth was flat. The Greeks had already calculated the radius of the sphere with great precision centuries before.
Many of the “facts” on this list come from Hollywood scriptwriters who absolutely needed something to happen in a scene that wouldn’t work in real life. From CPR to deflators, a lot of emergency medicine doesn’t magically take a dying person from on the brink to breathing and talking within moments.
There is no “24 hour waiting period” on a missing persons report. If someone is missing, even if its for just an hour, you can most certainly file a report.
that life expectancy several hundred years ago was only 35 or so.the average age was lower due to incredibly high infant mortality rates. however, if you could survive infancy/childhood, you’d likely live well into your late 50s or 60s.
CPR is used to restart hearts and is quite successful. CPR is hugely unsuccessful and isn’t used to restart hearts, it’s used to keep circulation going until medication to restart the heart can be administered.A defibrillator is used to restart hearts. Nope again. It’s used to stop hearts that are beating incorrectly in the hope that when they restart they’ll be beating all nice and proper.
There is also a strange cottage industry around survival tips that are simply unhelpful, bizarre, or even dangerous. It seems like every single wilderness expert has their own suggestion on what to do if you see a bear, which of course also depends on the type of bear, the time of year, and, presumably, a host of other factors.
Many people believe that eating carbs makes you fat. Carbs don’t make you fat, overeating food does.
St Patrick isn’t Irish. He’s Welsh.
In a few cases, simple repetition of an outdated fact has done the trick. Once a piece of information is thoroughly embedded in the public consciousness, it becomes very hard to dislodge, it even gains a sort of mythological power where people repeat it, without being able to identify where they first heard it.
Sugar makes kids hyper. It does not
It is a complete falsehood that if a penguin does not find love, it waddles off to die alone.I was horrified when I first saw this, and since I couldn’t find anything else on the internet about it, I reached out to Dr. Dees Boersma at the University of Washington and asked her about this claim.She told me that she has 33 years of data and has observed pairings that have stayed together for as long as sixteen years. She also told me that penguins can get ‘divorced’ when not successful at mating, and that they will most likely will ‘divorce’ if not hatched. There is also a major gender skew of more males than females. If a male want a mate, he HAS to have a nest set up. Furthermore, females don’t come ashore unless they are going to mate. So some females will skip breeding season if they are not in a mating mood.For example, a female she studied had skipped pairing with her male for a year. The male looked for another mate didn’t find one, and then the next year she was back with him. They do have emotions and they do vary in aggressiveness over a lifetime.Furthermore, because there are many more males than females, a lot of males have never gotten mates. One of the penguins they’ve studied, “Turbo”, a Magellan penguin, has not had a mate in 14 years and he keeps on trying.So penguins do not, in fact, waddle off to die if they do not find a mate.
That you eat 8 spiders in your sleep. You actually eat them mostly in your processed food, as the FDA allows a limit on things like peanut butter and tomato soup.
But some border on absurd, for example, the fact that undercover cops have to tell you. Besides the fact that this would make the entire point of being undercover useless, it’s probably a good idea to understand that the police can and will lie to people during the course of an investigation. Hence why it’s always best to lawyer up.
The best way to escape a bear is to run down hill. You may get faster running down hill, guess who else does too?
Einstein didn’t fail math
In some rare cases, these facts were spread as disinformation and have simply managed to survive any scrutiny. This is why lists like this are useful, as it helps reset all the incorrect facts we might each be carrying around. So if you would like to investigate some more ofBored Panda’sactually false fact lists,look no further.
“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day.“This originated as an ad campaign to sell breakfast cereal.
That we only use 10% of our brain and if we could use 100% we’d all be super geniuses or something.
The whole tongue map thing. You don’t have parts of the tongue that only react to a specific taste.
While dining, the ancient Romans did not ritualistically eat so much that they had to interrupt eating to go vomit. An entranceway to a stadium of that time was called a vomitorium and had nothing to do with dining. I have seen this “fact” in at least two children’s history books and I have no idea how or why some historian came up with this weird claim.Speaking of eating, those fat “Buddha” statues and depictions you see in some Asian restaurants are not the historical Buddha (who founded Buddhism and was not obese). They are Budai, a 10th-century Chinese folk hero, who eventually became a buddha himself.
See Also on Bored Panda
That Pearl Harbor was the only attack on US soil during WWII.In fact, the Japanese bombed Dutch Harbor and invaded the Aleutian Islands. There were also U-boat attacks on the West Coast and German spies who landed via U-boat on the East Coast. None of these were particularly consequential in the grand scheme of things though, so they were forgotten.
Microwaves and cell phones cause cancer from “radio waves”.The visible light spectrum has more energy than any of the waves coming from your microwave or cell phone. Both microwaves and cell phones do not emit ionizing radiation. However, humans do! :D
If you’re undercover and a cop you have to tell me
Blood isn’t blue in your veins. It’s definitely still red. Just darker.
Urine is not sterile.
That daddy longlegs are the most venomous spiders in the world, but their fangs just aren’t big enough to spread enough venom
The mantis shrimp can’t see a million zillion colors, earlier researchers made an assumption that their cones worked in the same way as our three do (color opponency). The Oatmeal and a few others didn’t know how to differentiate assumption from fact and popularized this idea of a hyperaware shrimp. Extensive studies since then have disproved their color discrimination magic because, surprise, their retina is built differently.I think their onepunchman strength is still valid though
You see this in the media a lot. That a heart attack is the same as cardiac arrest. It’s not. In order for a body to function normally, blood needs to flow to the cells to drop off oxygen and nutrients and take away waste products. If that process stops, the cells begin to starve, fill up with waste and die. The blood travels through arteries in the heart just like most other places in the body. A heart attack is when one or more of those arteries are blocked and the heart tissue starts to die from starvation. If enough cells die, the entire organ dies. A cardiac arrest is when the entire heart fails to pump normally. Resulting in that blood flow stopping throughout the entire body. Not just the heart. There are several causes of cardiac arrest. One of them being a major heart attack that kills enough of the heart muscle. But you can have a cardiac arrest from having a multitude of medical problems. From a burst blood vessel in your brain to a blocked blood vessel in your lungs and even losing enough blood or having a huge systemic infection. These are the people who need CPR. Edited for over simplification and clarity.
That a soul has weight (specifically 21 grams).The study that this is based on only tested 6 people. One out of the six lost weight at death and only at death. The rest of the patients either had multiple fluctuations, not just at death, or had no change at all. The researcher even said that more studies would need to be done, yet for some reason many people now think that a soul weighs 21 grams.
There were two that used to get circulated in chain emails back in the day. I haven’t seen it in a while, so maybe its gone, but:A Pregnant Goldfish isn’t called a “Twit.” For one, Goldfish don’t get pregnant; They lay eggs. Secondly, there isn’t a record before 1990 or so of anyone saying this.Second, a duck’s quack does indeed echo. I suspect it was also just made up at some point, but there isn’t anything special about a duck that makes it break the laws of physics.
Saturated fat causes heart disease. This is a common misconception based on Ancel Keys’s Seven Countries Study from 1961, where he cherry picked data from seven of the 20ish countries he studied, and constructed a trendline that illustrated the narrative he believed: that we are more likely to get heart disease with the more saturated fat we consume.
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