I don’t care if it’s wrong, Marilyn Manson had his ribs removed so he could blow himself
They taught you that in school?
I learned that in middle school. It was from a kid on the bus but it was still middle school.
You do your most important learning outside of the classroom
Believe it or not, this rumor actually stretches all the way back to dianunzio from Italy in the 1940s.
I still want whoever decided that “I before E except after C” should be taught to children locked up. Im almost 50, and I still spell “their” wrong if I dont concentrate.
Fruit and vegetables being separate categories: Fruits are actually a type of vegetable. Additionally cucumbers are melons.
Cyan being a light blue: It is actually 50% green.
Simple machines are fundamental: They completely ignore compliant mechanisms and aren’t atomic. Actually atomic mechanisms would be defined by the type of force, the shape, and the compliance.
The only form of Socialism is Marxism and Communism and Capitalism means markets: Look up Mutualism or Syndicalism.
Basically everything with pop psychology.
I am sure there are more, but these were just top of my head.
I guess the big one for me is the whole Mozart for babies thing. It wasn’t Mozart’s music making babies and young children smarter, it was a combination of more affluent parents or at least parents with college plus educations having time and income to spend on enrichment activities.
KETCHUP IS A VEGETABLE!
That whole “got milk” campaign was a load of bullshit.
It turns out only about 30% of the global human population is able to even digest milk.
That, and most traditional dairy consuming European cultures never actually drank milk. They made cheese and butter, then poured the remainder in the pig trough to turn those calories into pork.
man i cant even have my mocha frap without oat milk
In the US, Trump would demand this site be “de-woke-ified” to remove “conservative bias” by having any conservative fact disproven removed from results.
Most of what I learned about genetics is incorrect as when I graduated we thought DNA ran the show.
We were also wrong about why the USSR fell (not a huge surprise)
Why did we think think the USSR fell? Also DNA does run the show…damn, my genetics knowledge is shit. Apparently we graduated the same year 🤣
I graduated when people accepted Gaidar’s propositions whole cloth and now we blame Gorbachev a lot more than we did in 2000
mRNA runs the show
Class of 2003.
Food wheel was taught in elementary school. As were the taste bud “zones” and the American Dream.
We had the Food Pyramid here in Canada, which is very similarly a lie pushed by the dairy and grain industries and not linked to any real health benefits.
Left brain/right brain pseudoscience
Alpha wolf is a lie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions
The history list was most interesting in my opinion.
Obligatory “there’s a xkcd for anything, isn’t it?”
Five senses; taste, touch, smell, sight, hearing, acceleration, temperature, body configuration, pain, balance, time, hunger…
You are missing CO² chemoception. Our lungs tell us if there is a lot stale air, but not if we are in a pure nitrogen environment.
And interestingly: no sense for wetness.
Getting the washing off the line…time to play “is it still wet, or just cold”
Facts.
Acceleration, temperature, body configuration (positioning), pain, balance and hunger are all related to touch in one way or another.
Time, however, is legit. Along with emotion. Maybe you could call the 6th sense cognition?
Proprioception (body config) is actually feedback from the muscles.
Also they forget or were unaware of the most interesting sense: CO² chemoception. It is how our lungs tell if we need air.
In theory we can break down the sense of sight into subcomponents, too. It’s only the visual cortex that processes those raw inputs into a coherent single perception. We have two eyes but generally only perceive one image, even if the stereoscopic vision gives us a good estimate of distance, and one eye being closed or obscured or blinded fails pretty gracefully into still perceiving a single image.
We have better low light sensitivity in our color-blind rods but only have color perception from our cones, and only in the center of our visual field, but we don’t actually perceive the loss of color in those situations.
So yeah, someone putting a warm hand on my back might technically set off different nerve sensors for both temperature and touch, but we generally perceive it as a unified “touch” perception.
Similarly, manipulating vision and sound might very well throw off one’s proprioception, because it’s all integrated in how it’s perceived.
Isn’t acceleration just a sense of balance? Like you feel acceleration because the whatever fluid moves in your ears due to acceleration which is the same as balance.
I was going to say you have a static sense of what orientation you are in, e.g. you can tell standing up Vs lying on your front/back/side without relying on other senses and that feels different to the sensation of moving…
But thinking about it I guess the orientation sense is just detecting acceleration due to gravity?
i’d say the somatogravic illusion being a think kind of proves you right.
it is why kobe bryant helicopter crashed. the pilot lost in a fog thought he is going up, when he was just accelerating down really fast. there is air crash investigation episode about it.
I guess so, but similar to how a lot of taste is actually perceived via smell? I suppose linear and angular acceleration could be two separate senses which encompass the sense of balance.
Eh, it’s not really similar though. Yes, a lot of what we think of as “taste” is actually perceived via smell. But separately from that, there is actually a phsyiological sensation of taste that is unrelated to smell, i.e. the five basic tastes: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savoury.
Whereas there isn’t really any meaningful distinction between the sense of acceleration and balance. They’re exactly the same sensation, and the mind only knows which one you’re actually experiencing by cross-referencing what your other senses tell you. If you’re in a situation where these other senses are unavailable, people generally can’t distinguish whether they’re accelerating or off balance.
This has led to a number of plane crashes in history, in situations where pilots are in dense cloud cover and can’t see the horizon. During stressful situations, if they forget to look at the artificial horizon display, they think the plane is pitching up, and therefore try to pitch down to correct, when in fact the plane is accelerating (due to already being pitched down), resulting in a crash.
well, theres the sense of taste, referring to sweet, salt, sour, bitter and umami. then separately theres the sense of smell, sensing what we call aromas. These are two separate senses.
Our perception of taste could be argued includes the two senses
A short list of things you didn’t realize were false, stolen from the most recent episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast (on Intellectual Humility, Sept 14 2025):
- “The original 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds lead to a mass panic.” – It did not. However, rumors of a panic spread via newspaper op-eds about how it was a bad idea to get your news through any other medium besides newspapers. Citation: https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-panic-myth-the-infamous-radio-broadcast-did-not-cause-a-nationwide-hysteria.html
- “You can boil a frog in a pot by gradually raising the temperature of the water.” – This doesn’t work; frogs just jump out when they get uncomfortable. Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
- “Lemmings march off cliffs to their deaths because they blindly follow one another.” – They don’t. Citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemming#Misconceptions
- “…but I saw it in a Disney documentary!” – Nope. Turns out the filmmakers paid local kids to capture a bunch of lemmings, spin them around to make them dizzy, then manually threw them off cliffs and filmed it. Citation: https://hyperallergic.com/545742/white-wilderness-disney-nature-documentary/
I actually learned the lemmings thing from the windows 95 era PC game “Lemmings”. This is also how I learned that lemmings have green hair!
fun fact, lemmings was developed by a little studio called DMA designs, which later changed name to Rockstar North, and is nowadays most known for the GTA games.
That is indeed a fun fact!
My favourite DMA game was Blood Money.
Good old times!
Thanks for bringing that memory up!Huh. TIL.
They are skilled with bricklaying and mining tools too ⛏️
I’m not sure if “skilled” is the word, but they get by
Let’s go! Door creaks
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The War of the Worlds broadcast didn’t cause mass hysteria, but it did cause some people to go outside and shoot at the nearest water tower.
TIL Lemmings are an actual creature and not just from the PC game Lemmings! I’m guessing that’s why it’s named “Lemmy” and then has a logo of a rodent. I just thought it was a random name and a drawing of a mouse this whole time.
I thought everyone knew the lemmings thing was made up. But it’s become a bit of a meme nonetheless.
I don’t think there’s a time when everyone knows something
More extracts from that same podcast:
In each case, right up until the moment I received evidence to the contrary, all this misinformation, these supposed facts, felt true to me. I had believed them for decades and I had accepted them in part because they seemed to confirm all sorts of other ideas and opinions floating around in my mind. Plus they would have been great ways to illustrate complicated concepts, if not for the pesky fact that they were, in fact, not facts.
That’s one of the reasons why common misconceptions and false beliefs like these spread from conversation to conversation and survive from generation to generation and become anecdotal currency in our marketplace of ideas. They confirm our assumptions and validate our opinions and, thus, they raise few skeptical alarms. They make sense and they help us make sense of other things.
The lemmings thing never made sense to me until I found out what the film crew did to them. There’s just no way a species that susceptible to mass suicide could survive long term. They would have gone extinct long before the invention of bored documentarians.
What about the BBc documentary with the spaghetti trees?
On the lemmings one, have you never seen hexbear?
The mitochondria better still be the power house of the cell. Or we are going to flip some tables and burn the place down.
See, I was told that too, but no one bothered to explain what that means. I still have no idea what that actually means. What is a powerhouse?
A mitochondrion (pl. mitochondria) is an organelle found in the cells of most eukaryotes, such as animals, plants and fungi. Mitochondria have a double membrane structure and use aerobic respiration to generate adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which is used throughout the cell as a source of chemical energy.[2] wickerpedia
Cells can’t use the energy from sugar directly. The mitochondrion turns the sugar into another molecule that other organelles can use for energy.
Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is a nucleotide triphosphate[2] that provides energy to drive and support many processes in living cells, such as muscle contraction, nerve impulse propagation, and chemical synthesis. Found in all known forms of life, it is often referred to as the “molecular unit of currency” for intracellular energy transfer.[3] John “Wick” Peta
Friendly neighborhood microbiologist here. You’re right except for one thing: most cells can use sugar directly through anaerobic respiration. Mitochondria facilitate aerobic respiration, which utilizes oxygen and is far more efficient, albeit a bit slower, and produces carbon dioxide as its end product.
Fun fact: ever wonder where your weight goes when you lose weight? CO2. You literally breathe most of it out.
I can get as nerdy as you want if anyone has any questions.
Edit: another cool one! Part of the process that regenerates ATP from ADP is ATP synthase. Look it up! It’s literally a little biological waterwheel that utilizes a chemical gradient, established by the mitochondria, to smoosh ADP (adenosine DIphosphate) and a phosphate back together into ATP (adenosine TRIphosphate).
What would happen if I got ATP injected directly in the blood stream? And what about the stomach? Skin?
Fun fact: ever wonder where your weight goes when you lose weight? CO2. You literally breathe most of it out.
Maybe the way you do it. I lost 5 pounds this morning, you wouldn’t want to breathe.
On that (brown) note: most of the solid part of shit is actually (dead) gut bacteria, not food waste
This is why partially why fiber helps with bulking and pooping. Fiber is “fiber” because it’s made of things we can’t digest, but our gut microbes can. One of the byproducts of their utilizing it is SCFAs, short chain fatty acids. These confer various benefits like reduced inflammation and enhanced mucous production, which helps you drop a deuce.
Feeding your microbes also means you grow more of them, which makes your turds bigger and easier for your intestines to push along.
Yet another fun fact: ruminants like cows ferment otherwise indigestible plant matter in their guts, breaking it down and growing absolutely huge quantities of microbes in the process. Then they digest those microbes. That’s how they get enough protein. A cow is a mooing, shitting house of horrors if you’re a microbe.
Well tough guy, this morning was an oatmeal surprise swirl, with carrots, two inches above the waterline. In a Crane Galaxy #3251D701100, you do the math.
Fun fact: ever wonder where your weight goes when you lose weight? CO2. You literally breathe most of it out.
BRB. Hyperventillating to test a theory…
(Going to assume this just results in a smaller quantity of calories processed per breath before anyone get’s all sciencey on me.)
Cells can’t use the energy from sugar directly.
Well, they can, but it’s not very efficient. They produce 4 atp at the cost of 2 atp. The mitochondrion generates 34 atp from pyruvic acid at the cost of 2 atp.
Keeping in mind those numbers are vibes and not exact
They were a 1980s superband with Robert Palmer, I think.
*Power Station
No that was The Power of Love by Huey Lewis.
It just means it’s the system that turns food molecules and oxygen into energy for the cell. The cell itself doesn’t know how to do this which is quite spectacular when you think about it. So if the mitochondria died the cell would die.
There are human cells without mitochondria, and plenty of energy chains outside of mitochondrial action.
There are, in fact lots of them: your red blood cells, for example.
Mitochondria are more efficient at energy production, not the only source. Red cells use glycolysis.
You as a human organism would die pretty fast because you need that more efficient energy production but a lot of your cells would be fine until the effects of the system collapsing around them go into effect.
Don’t think about that metaphor too deeply.
When cells devide there’s a top cell and a bottom cell, the bottom cell is where the powerhouse is generated
No one tell them.
Oil and gas is the powerhouse of the cell - Exxon Mobile
T H R I L L H O
For me it’s the regions of the tongue thing. It never made any sense, and a 6 year old with a sugar cube could have disproved it. Yet they taught it in schools for years.
We did test it in school with different substances
I was like “I can mostly still taste it everywhere” and the teacher basically told me I was wrong
Yes. We did this experiment in school, too!
I can confirm that a six year old with a sugar cube can at least throw some skepticism at this one.
I was told I must be doing the experiment wrong.
I did get a quick preview about education, gullibility and gaslighting on that day.
The idea, to me at least, wasn’t that the regions were completely distinct, merely dominant.
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What
What chicken? Sorry I have no idea what your saying.
wow, sorry, seems I clicked reply on the wrong comment. The app I use is more fiddly than I thought 😥
