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It's time to put an end to the most alluring science myths, misconceptions, and inaccuracies passed down through the ages.
To help the cause we've rounded up and corrected dozens of the most shocking science "facts" that are bizarrely wrong about food, animals, the Earth, biology, space, alcohol, and health.
FOOD MYTHS
This one is no longer true.
Before April 2012, Starbucks' strawberry Frappucino contained a dye made from the ground-up bodies of thousands of tiny insects, called cochineal bugs (or Dactylopius coccus).
Farmers in South and Central America make a living harvesting — and smashing — the bugs that go into the dye. Their crushed bodies produce a deep red ink that is used as a natural food coloring, which was "called cochineal" red but is now called "carmine color."
Starbucks stopped using carmine color in their strawberry Frappucinos in 2012. But the dye is still used in thousands of other food products — from Nerds candies to grapefruit juice. Not to mention cosmetics, like lovely shades of red lipstick.
Sources: Business Insider, CHR Hansen, AmericanSweets.co.uk, FoodFacts.com, LA Times
It's the worst when something you really wanted to eat falls on the floor. But if you grab it in five seconds, it's ok, right?
The five-second-rule isn't a real thing. Bacteria can contaminate a food within milliseconds.
Mythbusting tests show that moist foods attract more bacteria than dry foods, but there's no "safe duration." Instead, safety depends on how clean the surface you dropped the food on is.
Whether you eat it or not after that is up to you, but if the people that walk on that floor are also walking around New York City, for example, we wouldn't recommend it.
Sources: Business Insider, Discovery.com
Who doesn't love the post-Thanksgiving nap? After all, turkey contains tryptophan — an amino acid that is a component of some of the brain chemicals that help you relax.
But plenty of foods contain tryptophan. Cheddar cheese has even more than turkey, yet cheddar is never pointed out as a sleep inducing food.
Experts say that instead, the carbs, alcohol, and general size of the turkey-day feast are the cause of those delicious holiday siestas.
Sources: Business Insider, LiveScience
But castoreum is so expensive, at up to $70 per pound of anal gland (the cost to humanely milk castoreum from a beaver is likely even higher), that it's unlikely to show up in anything you eat.
In 2011, the Vegetarian Resource Group wrote to five major companies that produce vanilla flavoring and asked if they use castoreum. The answer: According to the Federal Code of Regulations, they can't. (The FDA highly regulates what goes into vanilla flavoring and extracts.)
It's equally unlikely you'll find castoreum in mass-marketed goods, either.
Sources: Business Insider, Vegetarian Resource Group, FDA, NY Trappers Forum
Flickr/lhongchou's photographyFalse.
For one month, scientists fed dozens of people candy bars containing 10 times the usual amount of chocolate, and dozens of others fake chocolate bars.
When they counted the zits before and after each diet, there was "no difference" between the two groups. Neither the chocolate nor the fat seemed to have any effect on acne.
Source: JAMA
Apples are packed with vitamin C and fiber, both of which are important to long-term health, but they aren't all you need.
And if certain viruses or bacteria get into your system, an apple will unfortunately do nothing to protect you.
Go ahead and get that flu shot, even if you eat apples.
Source: Business Insider
This is an incredibly successful bit of advertising that has wormed its way into our brains and policies to make milk seem magical.
The US Department of Agriculture tells us that adults should drink three cups of milk a day, mostly for calcium and vitamin D.
However, multiple studies show that there isn't an association between drinking more milk (or taking calcium and vitamin D supplements) and having fewer bone fractures.
Some studies have even shown an association with higher overall mortality, and while that doesn't mean that milk consumption itself was responsible, it's certainly not an endorsement.
Sources: Business Insider, NYTimes, Journal of Bone Mineral Research, JAMA Pediatrics, The Lancet, British Medical Journal
Most research finds no correlation between caffeine consumption and bone growth in kids.
In adults, researchers have seen that increased caffeine consumption can very slightly limit calcium absorption, but the impact is so small that a tablespoon of milk will more than adequately offset the effects of a cup of coffee.
Advertising seems to be largely responsible for this myth: Cereal manufacturer named C.W. Post was trying to market a morning beverage called "Postum" as an alternative to coffee, so he ran ads on the "evils" of Americans' favorite hot beverage, calling it a "nerve poison" that should never be served to children.
Sources: Business Insider (1, 2), Smithsonian Magazine
If you're home sick with a cold, you can totally go ahead and comfort yourself with some ice cream.
The idea that dairy increases mucous production is very fortunately not true, according to researchers and a doctor at the Mayo Clinic, who says "in fact, frozen dairy products can soothe a sore throat and provide calories when you otherwise may not eat."
Bless him.
Sources: Business Insider, American Review of Respiratory Disease, Mayo Clinic
In the 2009 book "Fat Chance," the author, Dr. Robert Lustig, claims that sugar stimulates the brain's reward system the same way that tobacco, alcohol, cocaine, and even heroin does, and therefore must be equally addictive. Lustig even cites studies that show parts of our brain that light-up from a sugary reward are the same parts that get excited for many types of enjoyable activities, from drinking alcohol to having sex.
The problem, however, with these types of scientific studies of the brain is that "In neuroimaging, there is no clear-cut sign of addiction," Hisham Ziaudden, an eating behavioral specialist, told Levinovitz.
So, scientists don't know what addiction in the brain looks like, yet, and until that mystery is solved we should not be living in fear from something as fanciful as sugar addiction.
Source: Business Insider (1, 2), "Fat Chance"
Numerous scientific studies have tried and failed to find any evidence that supports this off-the-wall notion.
The myth probably emerged in 1974, when Dr. William Crook wrote a letter to the American Academy of Pediatrics, which published it. "Only in the past three years have I become aware that sugar ... is a leading cause of hyperactivity," the letter stated.
A letter does not include the rigorous scientific research that a paper does, and according to the National Institute of Mental Health: "The idea that refined sugar causes ADHD or makes symptoms worse is popular, but more research discounts this theory than supports it."
Sources: University of Arkansas for Medial Sciences, Business Insider, NIH
Dogs and cats have much better color vision than we thought.
Both dogs and cats can see in blue and green, and they also have more rods — the light-sensing cells in the eye — than humans do, so they can see better in low-light situations.
This myth probably comes about because each animal sees colors differently than humans.
Reds and pinks may appear more green to cats, while purple may look like another shade of blue. Dogs, meanwhile, have fewer cones — the color-sensing cells in the eye — so scientists estimated that their color vision is only about 1/7th as vibrant as ours.
Sources: Today I Found Out, Business Insider
Back in 2013, researchers reported a huge tumor growing out of the mouth of a great white shark, and another on the head of a bronze whaler shark.
And those aren't the only cases of shark cancers. Other scientists have reported tumors in dozens of different shark species.
The myth that sharks don't get cancer was created by I. William Lane to sell shark cartilage as a cancer treatment.
Sources: Journal Of Cancer Research, LiveScience
Frogs or toads won't give you warts, but shaking hands with someone who has warts can.
The human papillomavirus is what gives people warts, and it is unique to humans.
Source: WebMD
Many people would call this dinosaur a Brontosaurus — even Michael Crichton did in "Jurassic Park."
It is actually called the Apatosaurus. The myth emerged some 130 years ago during a feud between two paleontologists.
Source: NPR
Goldfish actually have pretty good memories.
They can remember things for months, not seconds like many people say.
Source: ABC News
Giraffes have fairly typical sleeping patterns.
To debunk this one, researchers closely monitored a herd of five adult and three young giraffes for 152 days, counting all of their naps and deep sleeps.
The animals typically slept overnight and napped in the afternoon (sound familiar?).
In total, each giraffe slept about 4.6 hours every day.
Source: European Sleep Research Society
You often hear sharks can breathe only when swimming pushes water over their gills.
That's true of some sharks, but many others — like bottom-dwelling nurse sharks — can pump oxygen-rich water over their gills without swimming.
All sharks lack swim bladders, however, so if they stop swimming they will sink to the bottom. Luckily a shark's body is incompressible and rapid descents or ascents don't harm them.
HIV probably didn't jump to humans through human-monkey sex.
It probably jumped to humans through hunting of monkeys for bushmeat food, which led to blood-to-blood contact.
Dropping a penny from the Empire State building is very unlikely to maim anyone.
A penny weighs roughly 1/11th of an ounce and tops out at 50 mph in freefall, which isn't fast enough to kill. It'd hurt like heck, though.
Sources: Today I Found Out, US Mint
This is only half true.
On the side of Earth that's facing the moon, the moon's gravity does indeed pull water toward it to cause tides.
On the other side of Earth, however, gravity is weaker (from the moon's pull on the other side) and it's the inertia of water from the Earth's rotation at work: spinning at about 1,040 mph flings ocean water into a slight bulge we recognize as the tide.
The world's tallest mountain technically is not Mount Everest.
Mount Everest is the tallest mountain above sea level, but if we're talking mountain base-to-summit height, then the tallest is the island of Hawaii that peaks as Mauna Kea.
Everest stands 29,035 feet above sea level. Mauna Kea only stands 13,796 feet above seal level, but the mountain extends about 19,700 feet below the Pacific Ocean. Over half of it is submerged.
That puts the total height of Mauna Kea at about 33,500 feet — nearly a mile taller than Everest.
Source: Tech Insider
Pure or distilled water doesn't conduct electricity well at all.
The reason we can get shocked when standing in electrified water is because water we come across will be contaminated by minerals, dirt, and other things that will conduct electricity.
Source: USGS
Earth's average surface temperature hasn't really budged since the start of the 21st century, but 70% of the planet is covered in water — and that's where 90% of heat trapped by global warming ends up.
In fact, warming of the oceans has caused them to thermally expand, creating a huge share of the sea level rise that scientists see today.
Sources: Scientific American/Climate Wire, Tech Insider
Older edges of a tectonic plate are cooler and denser, causing them to sink into the mantle where they're recycled. Where two plates are being yanked apart by this sinking, ocean ridges appear.
That's where the tectonic plate is being built — by hot, buoyant rock that convects upward and emerges from the stretched-out weak point. The resulting volcanism isn't what pulls two plates apart.
Source: USGS
During the early Middle Ages, almost every scholar thought the Earth was round, not flat.
This myth picked up steam in the 1800s, right around the same time the idea of evolution was rising in prominence — and religious and scientific interests clashed.
Sources: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Patheos
The northern hemisphere of the Earth is not closer to the sun when it is summer, nor is the southern hemisphere during its summer.
It is always warmer during the summer because Earth is tilted; during its year-long orbit, our home planet's tilt allows the sun's energy to hit us more directly.
Source: NASA
Wrong.
Guys, the hymen is a thin membrane that only partially blocks the vaginal opening — if a woman is born with one at all.
Also, plenty of activities other than sex can stretch or damage the hymen, including exercise or inserting a tampon.
Sources: Columbia University, College Humor
Vitamin A is a major nutrient found in carrots, and it is good for the health of your eyes — especially those with poor vision. But eating a bunch of the vegetables won't give your all-seeing superpowers.
The myth is thought to have started during as a piece of British propaganda during World War II. That government wanted to secret the existence of a radar technology that allowed its bomber pilots to attack in the night.
Source: Smithsonian Magazine
Blondes and redheads are not "going extinct."
Genes rarely die out, and recessive genes, like those that lead to red or blonde hair color, can be carried from generation to generation without creating the hair color. (As much as 40% of some populations, for example, carry a gene that leads to red hair color.)
When two people with the correct recessive genes have a baby, there's a good chance the kid will have red or blonde hair color — even if the parents don't have red or blonde hair themselves.
Studies on this turn up mixed results, at best.
Some studies on changes to working memory during pregnancy do show a small effect on the brain, though other studies show no negative impacts whatsoever.
There's actually growing evidence that being pregnant makes women more organized and smarter, at least, according to a study on rats.
It makes sense, though, since pregnant women and new mothers have a lot more to worry about and think about — for their brains to keep up they may even be getting a boost.
Sources: Dr. Myra Wick/Mayo Clinic, New Scientist
There's actually no such thing as a "photographic" memory — only very good memories.
Even people with exceptional or autobiographic memories don't recall events with visual details precise enough to mimic the fidelity of film or a camera sensor.
Source: Moments of Science
It's a common old canard: Creative people are right-brained, while the logically-minded are left-brained. False.
It's true that different hemispheres of your brain are more engaged in certain tasks (the left side is dominant in language, for example), but studies have never found overall left- or right-brain dominance in individuals.
Sources: Business Insider, Psychology Today
Nope.
Gum is mostly indigestible, but the occasional swallowed piece will pass through your intestines and exit the other side, just like anything else you eat that your body doesn't need and can't digest.
The only cases where swallowed gum has caused a problem is when that gum is swallowed along with other things that shouldn't be in your stomach.
Scientific American cites a case where a 4-year-old girl suffered a gastrointestinal blockage — from a wad of gum with four coins inside of it.
Sources: Business Insider, Scientific American
Microwave radiation won't cause cancer, it just heats food up.
Only a few types of radiation cause cancer, and these depend on the dose. Radiation from the sun can cause skin cancer, for example, but just enough helps your body make Vitamin D, too.
Microwaves also won't disrupt a pacemaker. However, things like anti-theft systems, metal detectors, powerful refrigerator magnets, mobile phones, and even headphones can mess with the heartbeat-keeping devices.
Sources: Cancer Research UK, American Heart Association
Shaving your hair doesn't make it thicker, it just makes it feel coarser for a time.
That's because the ends of the hairs are sharp and stubbly instead of smooth.
Source: Mayo Clinic
In 2009, scientists found that you actually have more like 86 billion brain cells.
It's tempting to round up, but this difference is significant when you consider the fact that 14 billion neurons might represent the entire brain of another creature.
Sources: Business Insider, The Journal of Comparative Neurology
Vitamins sound like a great idea: One pill that can provide you everything you need to be healthy!
If only they worked.
Decades of research on vitamins hasn't found any justification for our multivitamin habit, and in some cases, vitamins have actually been associated with an increased risk of various cancers.
Sources: Business Insider, Scientific American
Hydration is very important, but the idea that eight glasses of water is essential is a strange one.
In healthy people, researchers have not found any connection between fluid intake and kidney disease, heart disease, sodium levels, or skin quality.
But water is a calorie-free alternative to other beverages (especially sugary ones like soda or sports drinks), and people who drink water instead of those beverages consume fewer calories overall.
A good rule is to drink when you're thirsty — you don't need to count the glasses.
Source: Business Insider, FiveThirtyEight, Nutrition Reviews
Just because water is fizzy and refreshing doesn't mean it's bad for you.
In one of many studies that bust this myth, researchers made men bike on several occasions until they sweated off 4% of their body weight — then immediately handed them a drink.
One time the cyclists got flat water, another time carbonated water, yet another sugar water, and during a final trial everyone drank carbonated sugar water.
The results? Carbonation did not make any difference when it came to rehydrating.
Yogurt is often marketed as helping digestion and slimming our figure because of probiotics — the idea that "good bacteria" living in the yogurt will shack up in our guts.
Bacteria are well-connected to our metabolism and obesity rates, among other things, so the connection seems logical.
However, we don't yet understand how the millions of bacteria already in our bodies work together, let alone when yogurt is added into the mix.
This is not to say that yogurt is unhealthy, just that its benefits are oversold. Keep in mind, though, that a lot of yogurt is packed with sugar, which we do know contributes to obesity and other problems — so if you enjoy the dairy product, find some that isn't full of empty calories.
Sources: Business Insider, Tech Insider
Not really.
You lose body heat through anything that's uncovered, and your head is more likely to be exposed than other areas of your body.
"Most of the time when we're outside in the cold, we're clothed," Dr. Richard Ingebretsen told WebMD Magazine. "If you don't have a hat on, you lose heat through your head, just as you would lose heat through your legs if you were wearing shorts."
Sources: Business Insider,"Don't Swallow Your Gum!: Myths, Half-Truths, and Outright Lies About Your Body and Health," WedMD Magazine
If you wince and look at the afternoon sun, it might look yellow — but the light it gives off is actually white in color.
The Earth's atmosphere between your eyes and the sun is what makes the star appear yellow.
The gases bend the light in an effect called Rayleigh scattering, which is what also makes the sky blue and causes sunsets to blaze into brilliant oranges and reds.
Not helping matters is that astronomers classify the sun as a main-sequence G-type star, or the misnomer "yellow dwarf."
Sources: NASA, NOAA, Washington University, University College London
Wrong on a few levels.
While light can move unimpeded at 299,792,458 meters per second in a vacuum, it slows down when it travels through different substances. For example, light moves 25% slower through water and 59% slower through diamond.
Particles like an electron, neutron, or neutrino can outpace photons of light in such media — though they have to bleed off energy as radiation when they do.
What about light in a vacuum? Even then, the expanding fabric of space once exceeded light-speed during the Big Bang, and physicists think wormholes and quantum entanglement might be able to "move" faster as well.
Sources: Georgia State University, Tech Insider
Movie scenes of spaceships flying through a dense field of tumbling, colliding rocks are imaginary.
The Asteroid Belt — a zone between 200 and 300 million miles from the sun — is an incredibly lonely and desolate void.
In fact, if you pulled all the asteroids together they'd only weigh about 4% the mass of Earth's moon.
This is why NASA gets really excited when it catches so much as one asteroid colliding with another.
Sources: NASA, TodayIFoundOut.com
Most scientists agree space begins 62 miles up, where the Earth's atmosphere is more or less a vacuum.
Yet going past this line does not magically make you weightless; if you're in an accelerating rocket, you will feel many times Earth's gravity. It's only when you start falling that you feel weightless.
This is what it means to orbit something: to seemingly fall forever around that object. The moon around the Earth, the Earth around the sun, the solar system around the Milky Way Galaxy ... They're all falling into one another in a crazy cosmic dance.
If you're 250 miles above the Earth, you have to travel 17,500 mph around the planet to experience continuous freefall — precisely the speed of the International Space Station and its astronauts.
The moon sometimes looks so close you could reach up and up and grab it.
In reality, the moon orbits at a distance of about 239,000 miles from Earth. If you could somehow hop in a Boeing 747 and cruise to the moon at full speed, the journey would take about 17 days.
The moon is far, far away.
Sources: Tech Insider, Boeing
It's possible to stand an egg on its head on any day of the year — not just on the Spring Equinox.
The trick just requires a well-textured egg shell and a skilled hand.
Source: Business Insider
It's easy to think this, since we never see it, but the far side of the moon isn't always dark. It goes through the same lunar phases as the near side, which faces the Earth, but in reverse.
When there's a new (and very dark) moon on the near side, for example, that means there's a full moon on the far side. We just can't see it from our earthbound vantage point.
You forgot one: Plasma.
It's easy to assume solids are the most abundant form of matter in the cosmos, since we all live on a giant rock. But plasma is vastly more abundant; stars, including the sun, are gigantic orbs of glowing plasma.
Sources: NASA, Southwest Research Institute
Alcohol is a diuretic, so it's already going to make you pee a lot.
"Breaking the seal" the first time will not increase the amount of times you have to go to the bathroom — but drinking lots of alcohol will.
Source: Business Insider
The "hair of the dog" is a myth — a mimosa or Bloody Mary in the morning won't make you feel better. At best, you're just prolonging the hangover.
Same goes for coffee after a night of drinking. Like alcohol, coffee is a diuretic, so it will dehydrate your body even more and likely prolong the hangover.
Source: Business Insider
Excessive drinking can damage the connections between brain cells, but won't actually zap any of your neurons.
That said, children with fetal alcohol syndrome often have fewer brain cells, and excessive drinking over long periods of time can indeed damage the brain — just not in the way you may think.
Sources: Business Insider, NIH, New York Times
Eating before drinking does help your body absorb alcohol, but it only delays the alcohol entering your bloodstream, it doesn't restrict it.
Your body absorbs the alcohol more slowly after a big meal, so eating before drinking can help limit the severity of your hangover. Eating a lot after drinking, however, won't do much to help your hangover.
Source: Business Insider
Sugar that's the color of dirt doesn't make it more "natural" or healthier than its white counterpart. The color comes from a common residual sticky syrup, called molasses.
Brown sugar retains some of that molasses. In fact, brown sugar is mostly white sugar with some molasses — so refining it further would give you white table sugar.
While molasses contains some vitamins and minerals like potassium and magnesium, there is not enough in your standard brown sugar packet that should make you reach for it if you're trying to eat healthier.
As far as your body is concerned, white and brown sugar are one-in-the-same.
Sources: Business Insider,"The dispensatory of the United States of America," Self Nutrition Data
The myth that MSG (monosodium glutamate) is bad for you comes from a letter a doctor wrote to the New England Journal of Medicine in 1968, where he coined the phrase "Chinese restaurant syndrome" and blamed a variety of symptoms including numbness and general weakness on MSG.
Further research has not backed him up.
The scientific consensus according the American Chemical Society is that "MSG can temporarily affect a select few when consumed in huge quantities on an empty stomach, but it's perfectly safe for the vast majority of people."
MSG is nothing more than a common amino acid with a sodium atom added. Eating a ton of food or tablespoons full of the salt could cause the general malaise attributed to the flavor enhancer, and the placebo effect is more than strong enough to account for the negative effects sometimes associated with MSG.
Sources: Business Insider (1, 2), Tech Insider
In "Fed Up," a documentary film that probes the supposed causes of America's obesity epidemic, you hear the alarming statistic that "One soda a day increases a child's chance of obesity by 60%."
Authors of the study this statistic comes from note their findings "cannot prove causality" — but that's not what sugar-shaming movie producers would have you think.
Drinking too much calorie-loaded soda is likely unhealthy, but it's not the sole factor driving a rise in childhood obesity.
The CDC advises parents to do what they can to protect against obesity by encouraging healthy lifestyle habits that include healthy eating and exercise, both of which will likely do more for a child's waistline than trying to completely cut sugar.
Sources: Business Insider. "Fed Up," The Lancet, CDC
Fortunately, this isn't true either.
Cracking your knuckles may annoy the people around you, but even people who have done it frequently for many years are not more likely to develop arthritis than those who don't.
Sources: Business Insider, Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine
A tiny and largely misinterpreted study in 2002 recently fanned the flames of this myth, but limiting your caloric consumption may actually hurt your immune system more than helping it — it would certainly be a bad idea to not eat during the six- to eight-day duration of a cold.
Instead, doctors say to go ahead and eat if you can. The more accurate expression would be "feed a cold, feed a fever." And make sure to drink plenty of fluids.
Sources: Business Insider, BBC, Scientific American
Only a small percentage of people with Tourette syndrome randomly yell out swear words.
It actually encompasses a lot more than that, including involuntary movements and different sound tics.
The swearing tic is called coprolalia.
Source: Child Mind Institute
