Impressionable young minds currently sit in classrooms across America, believing their teachers know everything. They couldn’t be more wrong. Teachers are human, just like you and I, so it shouldn’t be shocking to learn that they mess up every so often.
But who knew they were teaching us things that are just plain wrong? We were completely mislead by these “facts” on topics like space travel and Napoleon.
These “facts” were so widespread outside classrooms, to the point where it’s not our teachers’ fault for relaying them…
1. Blue veins contain blue blood that’s deoxygenated.
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Blood is always red, no matter what. Veins are only blue because fat absorbs low frequencies in light. This leaves only the highly energetic blue light to pass through your skin.
2. You only have five senses.
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You actually have a ton, including hunger, thirst, movement, pressure, itchiness, and the need to use the bathroom.
3. Christopher Columbus was just a dude innocently looking to discover the new world.
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According to the Telegraph: “Columbus seized men, women, and children to take back to Spain and parade like circus animals. Most died on the voyage, and all were dead within six months. This spurred him to be more ambitious on his second voyage, in which he selected 550 of the best specimens he could find, and allowed his men to take whoever else they wanted, which turned out to be another 600. The journey back to Europe was so debilitating for the captives that Columbus ended up throwing over 200 corpses overboard. There are no records of what happened to the 600 taken by his men.”
4. You can see the Great Wall of China from space.
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In reality, it’s only visible by radar from space, and not the naked eye.
5. Your tongue has different areas for tastes.
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“Although there are subtle regional differences in sensitivity to different compounds over the lingual surface, the oft-quoted concept of a ‘tongue map’ defining distinct zones for sweet, bitter, salty and sour has largely been discredited,” according to a review article in The Journal of Cell Biology in August 2010.
6. Napoleon was super short.
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History initially pegged him at 5’2″, but today he’s actually believed to have been 5’7″, which was average for his day.
7. Raindrops fall in tear drop form.
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Wrong. In slo-mo, you’d actually see them more as little hamburger buns.
8. Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is about self-reliance and forging your own path.
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Piper Chapman from Orange Is The New Black put it right, “So the point of the poem is that everyone wants to look back and think that their choices matter. But in reality, s—t just happens the way that it happens, and it doesn’t matter.”
9. Humans only use 10% of the brain.
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We actually use it all. “It turns out though, that we use virtually every part of the brain, and that [most of] the brain is active almost all the time,” Barry Gordon, a neurologist at Johns Hopkins, says.
10. Bulls hate the color red.
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Bulls will charge at whatever object is moving the most. Mythbusters tested this by staging matadors in a ring with red, white, and blue capes.
11. There’s no gravity in space.
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Gravity exists everywhere, and the space shuttle orbiting Earth is actually in a constant state of free fall.
12. Electrons orbit in neat little circles around the nucleus.
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Instead, they likely undulate around the nucleus in a complex series of ripples.
(via BuzzFeed)
Apparently, you can’t trust anything you hear in life. Not according to science, anyway.
