Common “facts” that are actually false

Misconceptions are pervasive for many reasons—we want them to be true, they become entrenched as common sayings, or they simply align with our intuition. Oftentimes they are so familiar that we hardly have any reason to question them. Here are some of the many accepted “facts” about health, history, nature, and science that don’t hold up to scrutiny.



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Microsoft and partners may be compensated if you purchase something through recommended links in this article.

Dark side of the moon

With all due respect to Pink Floyd, there is no dark side of the moon. “It’s a phrase mistakenly used by people when they mean to say ‘far side of the Moon,’” explains NASA instructor Robert Frost. Since the Moon is tidally locked with the Earth, it always presents the same face. The opposite side, while unseen from Earth, nevertheless receives sunlight over the course of the lunar day.



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Microsoft and partners may be compensated if you purchase something through recommended links in this article.

The five senses

Virtually every child since the time of Aristotle has learned about the five senses in school. As it turns out, five is just the start: humans can sense much more than light, smell, sound, taste, and touch. We also perceive such essential qualities as temperature (thermoreception), pain (nociception), balance (equilibrioception), the position of our bodies (proprioception), the passage of time (temporal perception), and many inner states, such as hunger and thirst (interoception).



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Washington’s wooden teeth



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Dropped pennies

The idea that a penny dropped from the height of the Empire State Building could kill an unwary pedestrian has been passed down through generations. In a vacuum, pennies or even a piece of paper can be deadly from such a height; but back here on Earth, air resistance prevents a penny from gaining enough speed to even bruise skin. Something less prone to air resistance (like a ballpoint pen) could, however, prove lethal.



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Microsoft and partners may be compensated if you purchase something through recommended links in this article.


Microsoft and partners may be compensated if you purchase something through recommended links in this article.

Cancer-free sharks

Shark populations have plunged since the myth that shark cartilage can prevent or cure cancer became widespread (though shark fin soup also plays a part), but it’s founded on the mistaken belief that sharks don’t get cancer. In fact, sharks can and do get cancer, though at low rates. Recent research reveals that sharks have very stable genomes, and unlocking the key to that stability could provide new ways to fight a variety of age-related diseases, including cancer—that is, if sharks don’t become extinct before then.



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Sugar in the gas tank

Dumping a bag of sugar in your enemy’s gas tank has long been considered a cheap and effective way to ruin that person’s day. But it turns out that, instead of turning the gasoline into simple syrup and gumming up the works with hard candy, as popularly imagined, the sugar would just clog the filter, at worst. The reason? Sugar doesn’t dissolve in gasoline.



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Chameleon camo

Contrary to popular belief, chameleons can’t change their colours to blend seamlessly into any backdrop. Most species are born colour-matched to their natural environments for protective reasons; they can lighten or darken their skin to enhance the effect, but showier colour changes are more often meant to make them stand out in order to attract mates or to communicate aggression or submission. Some timid males even change colour to avoid confrontation by impersonating females.



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Lemming mass suicides

“Lemming” as an epithet implies one who blindly follows the masses to one’s doom. That false analogy is based on a cruelly staged scene in Disney’s White Wilderness (1958), where scores of lemmings appear to throw themselves into the ocean to perish. In fact, periodic population booms force the tiny rodents to migrate in herds in search of food; when the front line reaches the edge of a body of water or a cliff, they can be forced over—quite unwillingly.



Microsoft and partners may be compensated if you purchase something through recommended links in this article.


Microsoft and partners may be compensated if you purchase something through recommended links in this article.


Microsoft and partners may be compensated if you purchase something through recommended links in this article.


Microsoft and partners may be compensated if you purchase something through recommended links in this article.

Desert heat

Thanks to movie depictions, deserts are typically associated with scorching, sandy landscapes. But not all deserts are hot, or even warm: they can be frigid, foggy, scrubby, salty, and mountainous, too. One of the world’s driest deserts, the Atacama Desert in Chile, boasts pleasant temperatures year-round and occasional fog. The largest desert in the world—covering much of Antarctica—is also the coldest place on Earth, bottoming out at 89.2 degrees Celsius (128.6 degrees Fahrenheit).



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The little corporal

The man who once said “History is a set of lies agreed upon” would be chagrined to know he is falsely remembered as being short—a misconception that even inspired the name of the Napoleon complex, a condition characterized by increased aggression in short men. Napoleon’s was an ordinary aggression, however: his “little Corporal” moniker was affectionate, not descriptive, and his recorded height of five feet two is based on the French system of measurement at the time, equal to a respectable five feet six inches (1.68 metres) by today’s standards. It didn’t help that Napoleon favoured very tall soldiers for his Imperial Guard.



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Microsoft and partners may be compensated if you purchase something through recommended links in this article.


Microsoft and partners may be compensated if you purchase something through recommended links in this article.

Rechargeable batteries

There’s no such thing as a rechargeable battery. More specifically, batteries don’t store a charge in the first place: they store energy. Simply put, the energy in your phone, for instance, comes from chemical reactions inside the battery. “Recharging” is actually reversing that chemical reaction so it can happen all over again. To be fair, it’s a question of terminology more than anything. Reversible batteries, anyone?



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