It’s a collaborative site.
Cool but flawed website.
Earlier times dont include myths that are on later years.
There is no overlap in myths between 1990 and 1970-80 but there is with the myths of the 60s, so we stopped teaching it for 20 years and then went back to it?
“Sugar causes hyperactivity in children” is mentioned to have been corrected around 1995 but stops making the list from 1980 onward. I have heard it after 95 but not from school.
I wanna recommend it to others but i cant in this state.
Just put in 2010 and most of everything it said is incredibly obvious. Plus some of the dates of updated sources seem really incorrect. For example, one of them is it is a myth that most oxygen comes from trees, but I very distinctly remember my math teacher of all people saying in 2006 or 2007 that when he was in school he corrected people that it’s mostly from plankton. And even if I’m misremembering this, he definitely said something about it being from plankton in those years, but it says the updated sources are from 2020.
It says that it is a myth that the big bang theory explains where the universe came from but in 2020 we found out it doesn’t explain what came before. Like… No? That’s always been what it is. Sure, it’s always been a Christian talking point to sort of say that, but then why say 2020?
But I guess it’s hard to really gauge what should and shouldn’t be included. I remember my 5th grade teacher telling me that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man. I don’t really remember exactly what all she said and if she got deeper into Lost Cause rhetoric than that, but she definitely said Lee was a “good man.”
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I think it’s a neat idea but probably needs more contributors and for people to be a bit more critical with things. For example, an obvious one, I don’t see it mention that Pluto is no longer classified as a planet. That would be a great thing to mention, especially if you talk about things we used to consider planets but don’t any longer. Ceres is another example of this. In 1801 it was discovered and considered a planet until sometime in the 1950s (it seems like it wasn’t an all-at-once shift) when it was considered an asteroid despite its planet like appearance. Now it is considered a dwarf planet like Pluto.
Both 1960 and 2020 are showing the same 6 facts, and the facts shown were debunked years before 2020
Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet due to not clearing its orbital path.
Why would they just lie about Pluto like that?
#Pluto4Lyf
Part of the reason Pluto’s classification hit so hard in the US is that it’s the only ‘planet’ ever discovered by an USian astronomer. That national pride made the 2006 decision sting more than elsewhere. Some of the top figures from the AAS even challenged the legitimacy of the decision afterwards.
US pride, again.
Huh. I don’t think national pride that was a factor in my disappointment. I was more sad because 9 is a better number than 8, and Pluto is just a cute little guy.
I care that it is draconian nonsense. It wasn’t created by planetary scientists, or by consulting any. It was primarily created by a highschool teacher in Temecula California. It is temporally incongruent. Saying it is not a planet then calling it a planet in the following name is an oxymoron, or rather just moronic. And it impedes real science and science communication depreciating the era and discoveries that have happened.
The real definition of worlds is by gravitational differentiation and the point at which a body is dominated by geology.
No object is ever defined by external factors. It is a fundamental elementary logic failure to attempt to do so. If you drive your car in a bicycle lane and clear out all the cyclists, what the &%$# object is defined. Absolutely nothing! You may define a condition here, not an object, not a noun! The fact that this definition even exists is an epic embarrassment that makes the entire field look like a bunch of dogmatic clowns.
That definition exists because if you want to include Pluto and be consistent you have to include dozens of other bodies.
Because those other bodies are worlds. In centuries to come, every one of these will be important and uniquely valued.
What kind of argument is “reality too hard to science.” – Dogmatic clown level arguments. Anyone stating this should be purged from academia. This is the culture of the crisis academics talk about. This is the collapse. Fundamental contextual logic has failed. Planet is a verb, by the IAU definition, used incorrectly as a noun, in an oxymoron, with recursion. That is epic 16th century level nonsense. Nouns and verbs are what, 3rd grade level skills?
That’s messed up!
Cool site but sadly the link for “Learning styles (visual, auditory, kinesthetic) determine how you best learn” being debunked is both dead and missing from archive.org
I’d really like to know more since I’ve very recently been learning about very similar processing modalities for ADHD brains
Still, cool site and resource!
Was gonna say, I’ve seen this reposted for so many years I figured some one would have made it by now, o/w I was gonna. Thank you not-yet-dead Internet
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!
Let’s go! Door creaks
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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.
On the lemmings one, have you never seen hexbear?
The very architecture of the Internet (it was a written with a capital I back then) made it impossible to take over, and traffic would naturally route around any damaged links or nodes.
Google and CloudFlare have since proven that sonsabitches with enough money can subvert it completely, and it only takes a few dudes dragging an anchor from a boat to disconnect entire countries for weeks and months.
It took them a long time to get there. As corporate ISPs took over from the government and universities, the Internet got built around a few large pipes rather than several smaller ones. It’s cheaper to build and maintain, but more prone to failure.
Some of the redundancy from the old ARPANET is still around in the US. Everywhere else, it mostly got built as above. One ship laying an anchor somewhere they shouldn’t has brought entire countries offline.
It still routes around damage, but if all the roads are closed you can’t get in or out of somewhere.
The mitochondria better still be the power house of the cell. Or we are going to flip some tables and burn the place down.
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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).
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.)
It’s too hard to try to manually control a fast breath rate like that. What you want to do is to naturally push that up by doing a bunch of physical work so that you’re breathing heavily. Then you’ll be exhaling lots of carbon dioxide!
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
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.
They were a 1980s superband with Robert Palmer, I think.
When cells devide there’s a top cell and a bottom cell, the bottom cell is where the powerhouse is generated
Now Dennis, I hear speed has something to do with it.
T H R I L L H O
Buy me Bonestorm or go to hell!
We had to write angry letters to our children’s school about 5 years ago to get them to stop teaching taste regions. It’s really baffling.
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.
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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 😥
Five senses; taste, touch, smell, sight, hearing, acceleration, temperature, body configuration, pain, balance, time, hunger…
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.
And interestingly: no sense for wetness.
Getting the washing off the line…time to play “is it still wet, or just cold”
Walking/riding in a thin rain coat, the sensation of rain telling your body you’re completely soaked, while dry as a bone underneath.
Facts.
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.
The constitution of the united States.
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.
Absolutely. Mainly a problem of conservation of raw milk.
Mainly a marketing campaign by the dairy lobby
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.
I now refer to the [https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/healthy-eating-pyramid/](Harvard food pyramid) that seems to be meaningful
USA is a democracy
Wrong. It’s a republic.
‘‘You won’t have a calculator in your pocket all the time!’’
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IQ tests!
They are standardized eugenics and should be rethought entirely
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I agree. A much better test is whether you wear a red MAGA cap.
Left brain/right brain pseudoscience
