Article created by: Ilona Baliūnaitė
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 and asked the internet for 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.
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.
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.
Many people believe that eating carbs makes you fat. Carbs don't make you fat, overeating food does.
The structure of a wolf pack. Contrary to what most people think, there is no alpha, beta, ect. in the pack. Rather, the pack is made up of a family with the mother and father leading, followed by their cubs and later the families of their cubs. After a while the cubs break off from the pack to find their mates and will remain on their own.
St Patrick isn't Irish. He's Welsh.
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.
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
The food pyramid. It was lobbied into what we grew up on by the food industry, having plenty of grain. I mean, come on, grain is not more necessary than vegetables and fruit.
"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.
Eating carrots doesnt actually improve your night vision. This was a disinformation campaign carried out by the British in WWII to keep the Germans from discovering that they invented radar. Pretty funny/obvious once you stop and think about it.
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.
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.
Sharks aren't actually as dangerous as people make them out to be. I mean, I wouldn't recommend you hug one, nor would I recommend you suddenly act casual around them like they are buds, but it won't come and eat you just because you are there. They have a pretty fine diet, and only really eat anything outside of their diet if they are starving (which is rare).
The only time they will attack outside of feeding, is when they feel you are a threat, or when provoked, and are usually fended off pretty easily by hitting them on the snout/eyes.
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.
