I had to post this. First, because I've been living a life totally misinformed and that just irks me. Second, the
number 1 false fact “Humans Have Five Senses” (a fact I did know) is something many of us with
ASD kiddo’s learned about in our real life Autism 101 class called “Sensory Integration Disorder”. I’m glad to see the mass’s
getting a little education on this one.
10 Completely False ‘Facts’ Everyone Knows by Jessika Toothman
From geography to physiology, there are many examples of people
collectively doing it wrong by learning fiction as truth. Here are 10 of the
biggest errors walking around masquerading as well-known facts.
10. Mount Everest Is The Tallest Mountain in
the World.
Mount Everest is one whopping big mountain, but is
it the tallest in the world? In fact it is not. A mountain is highest in regard
to how far it soars above sea level. But technically it is tallest from base to
summit. And Mauna Kea kills it at being the tallest.
Here's the deets: Above sea level, Mauna Kea (in Hawaii) is only
13,799 feet (4,206 meters). But when you count the crazy enormous portion of it
that's underwater, it's 33,465 feet tall (10,200 meters). Everest, that snobby
little upstart, is only 29,029 feet (8,848 meters) above sea level, with none of
it below sea level [source: Mitchinson and
Lloyd].
But the shame doesn't end there. Mount Kilimanjaro hasn't taken
the stand yet. Kilimanjaro is 19,340 feet (5,895 meters) top to bottom. So it's
not as tall as Everest – but Everest is surrounded by the rest of its friends,
the Himalayas, all of which are collectively growing by a quarter of an inch
per year and pushing Everest's summit higher. Kilimanjaro, on the other hand, is
solitary, rising out from the relative flatness of
Tanzania all on its
dramatically striking own [source: Mitchinson and
Lloyd].
9. Body Heat Dissipates Mainly Through the Head.
You
lose most of your body heat through your head because there are so many blood vessels in your scalp. Or because
there's not a lot of fat between your scalp and your skull. Or because there's
a lot of circulation keeping your brain warm. Or something. At least, that's
what we've all heard. That's why you need to wear a hat in the winter:
Otherwise you'll catch cold.
But, the sad truth is, you lose just as much heat per square
inch through your head as you do through the rest of the body, a fact that
would become abundantly clear if you ever tried to scrape the frost off your
windshield while naked. (We don't recommend trying that experiment.)
So if you're out on a wintry day and you notice that your head
seems to be particularly cold compared to the rest of your body, it's probably
because your head is bare, and everything else is sensibly bundled up. Putting
on a hat will fix that problem.
It's less likely to keep you from catching a cold, though.
8. The Great Wall of China Is the Only Man-made
Object Visible from Space
The Great Wall of China gets a double whammy on this myth. You
can see other man-made objects from space (especially when the part of the
Earth being viewed is awash in the artificially illuminated glow of nighttime).
It's also pretty hard to pick out the Great Wall of China from any space-based
locale. In low-Earth orbit, it's next to impossible to see it with the naked
eye. Even with a fairly hefty camera lens, it's still challenging to tell if
you're looking at the Great Wall or not.
There are a couple of reasons this pseudo-fact is so far-flung.
For one, its history dates back to well before the Space Age, so no one knew
enough to nip it in the bud straight off. And for another, the Great Wall of
China is, well, a giant wall. Being hundreds of miles long, it's understandable
people would assume it sticks out like a sore thumb from space.
Yes, the Great Wall of China is very, very long. It's also built
from rocks collected from all over the local landscape – in other words, ones
that are usually the same color as the wall itself. So unless China decides to
give the wall a makeover and paint it hot pink, it's going to remain fairly
hard to spot from space.
7. Glass Is a Slow-moving Liquid.
You may have
lived for field trips as a kid, looking forward to a whole
day of out-of-school fun and exploring. That is, until you got started on a
tour of some musty building that seemed, well, boring. Not even the tour
guide's explanation of how the glass in the wavy, uneven windowpanes has slowly
flowed downward over time could keep your attention.
Liquid
windowpanes? No.
Rather than the (magical-sounding) slow drip of centuries, the
reason old glass windows aren't perfectly even and clear is because of how they
were made. Until the early-mid 1800s, most window glass was made using a
process called the crown method. The glass was blown, flattened, heated and
spun, yielding a sheet that was relatively cheap to produce. It was also
rippled and thicker in some places than in others.
In other words, the windows looked that way when they were
installed, and they look that way now. No downhill liquid flow is involved.
(And if you're really wondering: Glass is an amorphous solid. Learn more about
it in
6. Mother
Birds Will Abandon Babies if You Touch Them.
You're out in the yard and you see a
distressing sight – a baby bird is floundering around on the ground, looking
like it's desperate to get in the air, but it can't despite all its efforts.
Suddenly, out of your peripherals, you spot a cat readying for a pounce. Sacre
bleu! You rush over to scoop up the little bundle of feathers, take it into the
house, and try to remember how to assemble a shoebox nest to serve as a habitat
for your precious little find. You'll raise it yourself until it's ready to
fly.
While this is wrong on several levels, it's not because you
touched the bird.
Baby birds usually don't leave the nest until they're ready (or
at least readyish) to fly. But, just like how well you drove during your very
first driving lesson, they typically stink at flying at first. So needless to
say, they suffer a few false starts and end up on the ground, whining like a
teenager who wants the keys but hasn't completely got the hang of which is the
gas and which is the brake.
But that doesn't mean the fledgling's parents aren't supervising
their offspring. They're probably in a nearby tree, shuddering as their little
dunce forgets all the lessons they taught it. And if you leave the baby bird
alone, chances are they'll be there soon to smack it upside the head and tell
it to pay more attention during the next round of flying lessons.
As for the scent issue – birds just don't smell too well. A few
species are an exception, but chances are vastly greater that the little
chirping ball of fluff won't suffer if you need to move it to the other side of
the fence from where your dog plays. Plus, its parents have invested way too
much time and energy raising it to just scoot off at the first opportunity, no
matter how the little guy smells
5. Different Parts of Your Tongue Detect Different Tastes.
Lots of
people think different parts of the tongue are fine-tuned to detect different
tastes. The tip of the tongue is where you get your cupcake on, the sides are
where the salty taste really hits home, bitter's in the back, and in between is
the sour zone. This "fact" was the prevailing notion for a very long
time. It has persisted in spite of millions of kids in health class insisting
that the wooden spoon just tastes like wooden spoon, no matter how they lick
it.
More recently, however, we've found out that the whole zones
theory was pretty much bologna. (That would be the umami talking. More about
that in a sec.) It turns out people can sense different tastes all over their
tongues. There are a few outliers, but for most people, them's the facts.
Then there's the fifth basic taste that doesn't get a lot of PR,
and that'sumami.
Auguste Escoffier, the pimpest chef in 19th century France, concocted this
fifth wheel in the palate party. Foodies swooned over it – it's been described
as savory and meaty – but scientists stuck to the sweet/salty/bitter/sour taste
tetrahedron.
Even though umami was a familiar taste in Japan, the "fifth
taste" idea didn't get much traction there, either. That is until Kikunae
Ikeda, a whiz-bang Japanese chemist, decided to get to the bottom of what umami
was all about. He figured out the taste came from glutamic acid, and he called
it the Japanese version of yummy.
No one at the time believed him, though, and it wasn't until the
end of the 20th century that scientists decided to look into it. They realized
Ikeda was right all along.
4. People Thought the World Was Flat Before
Columbus.
Christopher Columbus' crew had a lot to be
worried about as they set sail. There was the possibility that they might wind
up with scurvy or meander into a vengeful weather front, and of course there
were all those warnings about where there be monsters.
But falling off the edge of the planet? Not so much. The idea
that Columbus was endeavoring to attempt the unimaginable, defy all existing
scientific precedent and become an international celebrity for not toppling off
the world is false.
People have known since the learned and logic-laden age of the
Greeks that they lived on a great, big globe. There were lots of obvious clues,
like the way ships sailed over the horizon and how the Earth cast a crescent
shadow on the moon.
There were many objections to Columbus' plan to reach the East
Indies via a somewhat novel route, but a tragic (and expensive) plunge into the
abyss wasn't one of them. Most contentious were the logistics. Given the
estimated (and not too shabby) size of the globe, there were steep odds his
ships wouldn't successfully reach their intended destination. In the 1800s, the
"knowledge" that our goofy, dark-ages ancestors had just up and
forgotten the shape of the thing that they lived on started to circulate
3. Deoxygenated Blood Is Blue
Everybody
has veins snaking up and down their bodies, and those veins are blue. So it
stands to reason that whatever magical and mysterious substance courses through
those veins (all right, fine, it's just boring, old blood) is, as a matter of
course, blue.
But no! Once your blood has stopped by the bank (your lungs)
and picked up a withdrawal of cash monies (oxygen) it's flush with greenbacks
(bright red blood). Once it's spent a night on the town (circulated through
your body), it returns with a massive hangover (the blood has turned dark red) and it
goes to curl up on the couch (take another pass through the heart).
Basically, the veins are blue thanks to a trick of the light,
not the color of what's inside them
2. Chameleons Change Color to Blend in with
Surroundings.
Chameleons
are one of the five coolest species in the world. That's a fact.*
They're wicked awesome for a number of reasons: their funny,
little two-toed feet, their uber-mobile eye cups, their super curly tails and
their other exciting physical embellishments. What's probably best about them,
though, is their polychromatic flare. But all those changing colors, unlike
what many people believe, don't have a thing to do withblending into their
surroundings. It hinges on the particular species, of course, but
they're usually pretty well camouflaged to begin with. If they need to visually
merge into the background, they can just stick with their normal coloration.
Instead, chameleon color-changing is triggered by physical,
physiological and emotional changes. If they're feeling fussy, say angry or
afraid or combative, they'll change colors using theirchromatophores.
They'll also change colors as a way of communicating in various manners (insert
romantic music here) and to pick a fight with a competitor. Light and
temperature play a big part, too, in how these little fancy pantses look.
*Chameleons' rank as one of the five coolest species in the
world is not, in fact, a fact. Although it is very, very likely
1.
Humans Have Five Senses.
We hear
what you're saying. We see your point of view. We feel your pain. Also, you
smell bad and possibly taste funny, the latter of which we don't intend to
test.
But if you believe these are the only five ways you can detect
information about your environment or alterations to your person, we're going
to punch you in the face. There. Boom. You will feel it thanks tonociception,
the ability to sense
pain.
There are lots more, too, although the lists vary and the final
number-of-senses tally is in great dispute. There are several boring ones that
your body does without you knowing it. So let's skip those. More interesting isproprioception,
which helps you pass the "close your eyes and touch your nose" test.
Basically, it's what lets two parts of your body connect without visual
confirmation. If you're (successfully) rubbing your eyes in disbelief, you used
proprioception to do it. If you accidently smacked yourself in the forehead
instead, you experienced a proprioception fail.
Apart from those, hunger and thirst can count according to
some, as can feelings of hot and cold. Itch, interestingly, is apparently
independent from both touch and pain. It's annoying on so many levels!
Reposted
from:
False facts,
urban legends and misconceptions litter the field of science. Learn about 10
completely false facts everyone knows.
