Fake ‘Facts’ You Learned

Think back to everything you learned as a kid. Think harder and you’ll probably realize how inaccurate a lot of those “facts” were. Much of what we’ve always assumed as common knowledge is flawed. Here are a few of the lies many of us have believed since we were kids.

Chameleons camouflage to blend in. Nope. The real reason chameleons change color is to control their body temperature and to express mood. As you can guess, darker colors absorb more light, so they’ll swap to a lighter color to stay cool. In terms of emotion, they’ll darken their shade when they’re scared and brighten when they’re excited.

Vincent van Gogh cut off his own ear. Probably not. But historians believe the real story is that van Gogh actually lost his ear in a heated argument with his friend and fellow artist Paul Gauguin. Apparently Gauguin, also a fencer, severed his ear off with his sword. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam stands by the original story, but several books dedicated to the artist’s life support this lesser-known theory.

Dogs have cleaner mouths than humans. Really? Dogs do not brush their teeth or floss, so no, their mouths are not cleaner than ours. You won’t find humans eating trash or licking out of toilet bowls, either. It is true, however, that the healthier the dog, the cleaner they are. It’s believed the clean mouth myth comes from the fact that dogs’ wounds heal after they lick them. It’s not their mouths are especially clean, it’s just a similar practice to us washing a wound to prevent infection.

You know the expression, “Blind as a bat” but did you know bats can see almost as well as humans. In fact some larger nbats see much better than humans. However, at night, their ears are more important than their eyes – they use a special sonar system called ‘echolocation,’ meaning they find things using echoes.

Pluto isn’t a planet. Don’t believe that, the ninth rock from the sun was reclassified in 2006 as a dwarf planet, but that nonetheless is still a planet.

Goldfish only have a three-second memory. Bull. The evidence shows that fish are just as smart as birds and mammals. According to studies, they can remember things for three to five months.

Isaac Newton discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head. Not quite. It is somewhat true that he discovered the law of gravity one day when he was sitting beneath an apple tree. But the revelation didn’t come to him because of one hitting him on the head. He did see one fall from a tree, which made him wonder why apples fall straight to the ground instead of sideways.

The blood in your veins is blue. Nope, it’s red, like all blood. Despite what you see when you look at your forearms, blood is red. Your veins may appear blue because of how light reflects and how it’s absorbed by your tissue. Your veins pump deoxygenated blood, which absorbs more red light and as a result appears more blue. The deeper the vein, the bluer it looks.

Bulls get angry at the sight of red. No, they are aggressive to a waving object of any color.

Camels store water in their humps. The humps are fat which provides them with about three weeks of energy. Camels’ kidneys and intestines do retain water.

Your nails keep growing after you die. Fingernails can only grow if new cells are produced, which is not possible long after death. Once the heart stops beating, nerve cells die within three to seven minutes.

The North Star is the brightest star. Nope, the North Star, aka Polaris, is actually 46th in brightness. But it is the closest brightest star to the north celestial pole.

You can see the Great Wall of China from space. While parts of the man-made structure can be seen with radar imagery taken from space, the Wall’s materials are too similar in color and texture to its surroundings to be distinguished from space.

Dogs are color-blind. If Rover could talk, he’s call that a fake fact. Man’s best friend can see the world in more than just black and white. Dogs can actually see in combinations of blue and yellow, which includes a lot of grayish-brown varieties. Their sight can be compared to a human with red-green colorblindness.

Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb. He was the one who filed a patent for it, but several others contributed to its invention before him.

Christopher Columbus thought the world was flat. Contrary to what you were probably taught in elementary school, Christopher Columbus was smarter than what we give him credit for. The Italian explorer knew the world was round even before embarking on his expedition. The fact that the world was a sphere was actually known 1,300 years before Columbus set sail. It is true, however, that many Europeans started to believe the flat earth rumors during the Middle Ages.

Fortune cookies were first made in China. Only if you spell China as California. Fortune cookies were an American invention, not Chinese, though there are debates about who was the originator. One well-known version is a Chinese immigrant living in Los Angeles created the cookie, while another claims that a Japanese immigrant started it in San Francisco.

Heat mostly escapes your body from your head. Your parents probably told you to wear a hat so you don’t get sick. While it can help keep you warm, your head doesn’t allow for any more heat loss than any other part of your body does. Any exposed part of the body will release heat equally.