Mythos
33 cards from across every topic, each citing a source. Tap one to open it in the feed.
- "70% of lottery winners go broke" has no source. The truth surprises.
The 70% figure has circulated widely; the US foundation supposedly behind it said in 2018 it never did such research. …
- "93 percent of communication is body language" – never what he meant.
Albert Mehrabian's 7, 38 and 55 percent come from two 1967 studies using single spoken words like "dear", female …
- 37 °C is the average of a measurement series from 1868.
The famous figure comes from Leipzig physician Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich, who published it in 1868. Modern …
- Carrots for night vision were wartime propaganda.
During the Second World War, British officials spread the myth that carrots explained their pilots' night-time success. …
- Facts don’t actually make people dig in.
For years it was said that corrections strengthen false beliefs (the “backfire effect”). Wood and Porter tested this in …
- Highlighting and rereading: the most popular study methods work least.
In 2013 Dunlosky and colleagues rated ten learning techniques against hundreds of studies. Highlighting, underlining …
- Knuckle cracking doesn't cause arthritis. A doctor tested it for 60 years.
The crack happens when you pull a joint apart: pressure in the joint fluid drops and a gas bubble forms abruptly. It …
- Marie Antoinette never said 'Let them eat cake'.
The line, originally 'Let them eat brioche', appears in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 'Confessions', written around 1765 …
- Medieval people already knew the Earth was round.
Educated people had known the Earth was a sphere since Aristotle in the 4th century BC; medieval textbooks such as …
- Michelangelo did not paint the Sistine Chapel lying down.
From 1508 to 1512, Michelangelo painted the roughly 500-square-metre ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, even though he …
- Muscle soreness isn't caused by lactic acid.
Lactic acid is cleared within about an hour after exercise. Delayed soreness, however, starts only 12 to 24 hours later …
- No, old window glass hasn't flowed downward.
A popular myth says glass is a slow liquid, which is why old church windows are thicker at the bottom. In fact, glass …
- Nothing special happens at full moon. You just remember it.
In 1985 Rotton and Kelly pooled 37 studies on lunar phase and behaviour and found no link; of 23 studies claiming one …
- Playing Mozart doesn't make your child smarter. Nobody claimed it did.
In 1993 Rauscher and colleagues found a brief gain on one spatial subtask that faded after about 15 minutes; IQ was …
- Shaving does not make hair grow back thicker.
A razor only cuts the shaft above the skin, not the root. An uncut hair tapers to a fine tip; a shaved one ends bluntly …
- Sugar doesn't make kids hyperactive. Parents just expect it.
A 1995 meta-analysis reviewed 23 controlled studies in which children were given sugar or a sweetener without knowing …
- The "red telephone" was never a telephone.
After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the USA and Soviet Union set up the hotline in 1963. It consisted of teleprinters …
- The 1938 radio panic was mostly a newspaper invention.
On 30 October 1938, Orson Welles aired "The War of the Worlds" as a fake news broadcast. Legend says millions fled from …
- The famous 150 friends is a very shaky number.
Robin Dunbar extrapolated from brain size and group size across 38 primate genera to about 150 stable human …
- The most famous prison study is now considered methodologically hollow.
Zimbardo's 1971 study was stopped after six days. In 2019 Thibault Le Texier used the archives to show guards were …
- The pirate eyepatch: an explanation better than the evidence.
The popular theory: pirates covered one eye so it could see instantly in the dark below deck. Physiologically plausible …
- The rule '8 glasses of water a day' has no source.
In 2002 a kidney physiologist searched for the scientific evidence behind the 8-glasses rule and found none. One likely …
- The tongue map from school is a misreading.
Sweet at the tip, bitter at the back, sour at the sides: this map goes back to a 1901 paper that found only tiny …
- The vomitorium was not a room for vomiting.
The story that Romans threw up in special rooms during banquets so they could keep eating is a modern invention. A …
- The world's most famous advertising experiment never happened.
In 1957 James Vicary claimed flashed messages in a Fort Lee cinema raised popcorn sales by 57.5 and Coca-Cola sales by …
- There are no left-brained and right-brained people.
In 2013 Nielsen and colleagues scanned the resting-state networks of over 1,000 brains. They found no individuals whose …
- Thermopylae wasn't fought by 300 Spartans alone.
In 480 BC, a Greek army of about 7,000 held the pass of Thermopylae for three days against a far larger Persian force. …
- Vikings never wore horned helmets. Blame Wagner.
Not a single Viking helmet with horns has ever been found; warriors of the years 800 to 1050 wore plain iron or leather …
- Visual learner? Research finds no evidence.
In surveys, over 90 percent of teachers believe people learn better when material matches their learning style. In 2008 …
- You don't use 10 percent of your brain. You use all of it.
Imaging shows activity across all brain regions, including during sleep. The brain is about 2 percent of body weight …
- Your blood is never blue, not even in your veins.
Deoxygenated blood is dark red, not blue. Veins look bluish under the skin because of how skin scatters light and how …
- Your blood pH cannot be shifted by a menu.
The pH of extracellular fluid is held tightly between about 7.32 and 7.42. Three systems interlock: the bicarbonate …
- Your gut isn't a tennis court, but it is a room.
For decades the gut's surface was said to match a tennis court, about 260 square metres. A 2014 measurement put it at …