50 Fun Facts About Common Misconceptions

What did Yang Liwei, China's first astronaut, report about seeing the Great Wall of China from orbit?

He could not see it, and NASA agrees: the wall is barely visible from low orbit even in perfect conditions and no more conspicuous than many other man-made objects. From the Moon, none of it can be seen.

Napoleon stood roughly 1.67 metres; how did that compare with Frenchmen of his era, despite the cartoons?

About average is right: 5 feet 2 inches in old French measure was just under 5 feet 6 inches imperial, the period's typical adult male height. British cartoonist James Gillray did most to popularise the myth of a tiny emperor.

Why does a matador's red cape not enrage the bull, which charges at the movement of the cloth?

Cattle are dichromats, functionally colour-blind where red is concerned, so the muleta is red by tradition and, it is thought, to mask the bull's blood.

Goldfish, said to forget everything within seconds, actually have a memory span of at least how long?

Three months is the floor: goldfish remember shapes, colours and sounds for at least that long, and MythBusters' fish still ran a maze correctly after more than a month.

Albert Einstein, far from failing maths, taught himself algebra and which subject at age twelve?

Calculus came so easily that he found an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem before his thirteenth birthday, and had mastered integral and differential calculus by fourteen.

Which two of the usual seven continents does the six-continent model used in Russia merge into one?

Europe and Asia become Eurasia in that model, while Greece and many Romance-speaking countries, including Latin America, also count six by merging the Americas instead.

In Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein is the name of which figure, rather than of the creature?

The scientist is Victor Frankenstein; his nameless creation was already being called 'Frankenstein' by 1908, and James Whale's 1931 film fixed the mix-up for good.

Which New York landmark is hit by lightning about 23 times a year, refuting 'it never strikes twice'?

The Empire State Building averages 23 strikes a year because lightning favours the most prominent, conductive object in reach, so tall towers are hit again and again.

How much of the human brain is in use over a day, contrary to the famous ten percent claim?

Nearly all of it: neurologist Barry Gordon puts it as using virtually every part of the brain, most of it active almost all the time. The myth is often pinned on Albert Einstein, who never said it.

Viewed from space, above the atmosphere, what colour does the Sun actually appear to an astronaut?

White is the true colour: the Sun emits across the whole visible spectrum and that mix reads as white outside the atmosphere, with scattering painting it yellow, orange or red near the horizon.

Horned helmets, mentioned in no Viking Age text, entered popular culture through whose Norse operas?

Richard Wagner's productions from the 1800s put horns and wings on Viking helmets, and the image stuck; contemporary sagas mention helmets often but never horned ones.

Chameleons, which rarely match their backdrop, change colour to regulate heat and, most often, for what purpose?

Social signalling is the main job: a chameleon's colour tracks its mood and its messages to other chameleons, not the leaf behind it.

What is the scientific verdict on the 'sugar rush', the hyperactivity that parents blame on sweets?

It is a myth, in the words of the scientific community: the evidence for sugar-fuelled hyperactivity is low quality, and a 2019 meta-analysis found sugar can actually lower alertness and raise fatigue within an hour.

Donald Unger cracked only his left-hand knuckles for fifty years to test for which feared ailment?

Arthritis never appeared in either hand, a result Unger published in Arthritis & Rheumatism in 1998 and for which he won the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Which sense beyond the classic five lets you touch your nose with eyes closed, as in a sobriety test?

Proprioception is the sense of self-movement, force and body position; with it intact, a person touches their nose blindfolded to within about 20 mm.

Where on the tongue is sweetness sensed, despite the textbook 'tongue map' that confines it to the tip?

Across its whole surface: every taste can be sensed on all regions of the tongue, some slightly more sensitive than others. The map came from Edwin Boring's 1942 re-plotting of a 1901 German study, which later textbooks misread.

Britain's wartime claim that carrots gave its pilots night vision was cover for which new technology?

Radar was the real secret, so the carrot story was fed to the public as well; by 1942 Britain was sitting on a 100,000-ton carrot surplus.

Gum that is swallowed, rumoured to linger seven years, actually leaves the body in roughly how long?

A few days at most: swallowed gum passes through the system about as quickly as any other food, and comes out, as one account puts it, 'pretty unmolested'.

The Coriolis force is too weak to steer a draining sink, so what mostly decides the spin direction?

The shape of the basin, the drain geometry and whatever motion the water already had are orders of magnitude stronger than Coriolis; identical toilets flushed in both hemispheres drain the same way.

Owing to the equatorial bulge, which Ecuadorian summit is the point on Earth's surface farthest from its centre?

Chimborazo's summit sits about 2.1 km farther from the centre of the planet than Everest's, because Earth bulges at the equator and Chimborazo stands only about one and a half degrees south of it.

Scholars in 1492 knew the world was round; what did they say Christopher Columbus had misjudged?

The distance to the Indies was the sticking point: his critics feared the East Indies lay far farther west than he presumed, and they were right; only the unexpected Americas saved his crews.

The Salem witch trials burned nobody; how were its nineteen convicted 'witches' actually executed?

Hanged, all nineteen of them; at least five more of the accused died in prison, and one man was pressed to death under stones as the court tried to force a confession.

Genesis never names the forbidden fruit; the apple is often traced to a pun on which Latin word for evil?

Malum meant evil and, with a different vowel length, also apple, a coincidence artists seized on; Latin Christian writers actually preferred pomum, plain 'fruit', which drifted to mean apple in Old French.

Whose Confessions, written while Marie Antoinette was a child, already contained 'let them eat cake'?

Rousseau put the line in book six of his Confessions, written in 1765, as the words of 'a great princess'; Marie Antoinette would not even reach Versailles from Austria until 1770.

Whose Gateshead home was the world's first with working light bulbs, before he merged firms with Edison?

Joseph Swan's house at Low Fell was the first anywhere with working bulbs, and his strong British patents pushed the rival firms into the 1883 Edison & Swan United Electric Light Company, 'Ediswan'.

Twinkies, rumoured to last for decades, actually carry an official shelf life of roughly how long?

45 days is the limit today, and before stronger preservatives arrived in 2012 it was just 26 days; the legend of a snack lasting ten, fifty or a hundred years is pure urban myth.

Why can harvestmen, the 'daddy longlegs' of legend, not be the most venomous animal alive?

They have no venom glands at all: a harvestman's chelicerae are grasping claws, not hollow fangs, and usually too weak to break human skin, which makes the creature harmless.

A camel's humps, widely believed to be water tanks, actually hold a reserve of what?

Fat is what fills the humps, a calorie reserve for lean times; the water a camel drinks is stored in its bloodstream, which is why it can go so long between drinks.

Which French tune of 1761, now 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star', did Mozart merely write variations on?

'Ah! vous dirai-je, maman' was first published in 1761 and was later arranged by several composers, Mozart's Twelve Variations among them; the melody existed long before he touched it.

Deoxygenated blood in human veins, whatever the textbook diagrams show, is actually what colour?

Deep red is the true shade, thanks to haemoglobin; oxygenated blood in the arteries runs a lighter cherry red, and no blood anywhere in the body is blue.

Old windows thicker at the bottom are cited as proof that glass flows; what actually explains the sag?

Imperfect manufacturing left those sags and ripples in the pane the day it was made; once solidified, glass stops flowing, and medieval panes at Westminster Abbey creep at most a nanometre per billion years.

Earth is nearest the Sun in January, so what actually gives the Northern Hemisphere its winter then?

The axial tilt of 23.4 degrees does it; in January the northern half leans away from the Sun, and the slight closeness of perihelion actually works against the season's cold.

Which famous line appears in none of Arthur Conan Doyle's sixty Sherlock Holmes stories?

'Elementary, my dear Watson' is credited to William Gillette's 1899 stage play, where it began as 'Oh, this is elementary, my dear fellow', and the 1939–46 Basil Rathbone films made it famous.

The Nuremberg iron maiden, shown to tourists as a medieval torture cabinet, first went on display in which period?

The 1800s is as far back as it goes: the Nuremberg iron maiden was first displayed perhaps as early as 1802, and no iron maiden is known to have existed before the 19th century.

Whom did al-Maqrizi blame for the Great Sphinx's lost nose in 1378, four centuries before Napoleon?

A Sufi Muslim iconoclast named Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr defaced it after finding peasants making offerings to the Sphinx; Frederic Louis Norden's 1737 drawings show the nose already gone.

Which of these fruits is a true berry in botany, a club that excludes strawberries and raspberries?

Banana makes the botanical cut, alongside grapes, tomatoes, cucumbers and aubergines, because a true berry forms from a single ovary; a strawberry's real 'fruits' are the seed-like achenes on its skin.

Fortune cookies, served in Chinese restaurants across America, actually originated in which country?

Japan is where they originated, and Japanese immigrants brought them to the United States; they are not an authentic part of Chinese cuisine at all.

The pot-bellied 'Laughing Buddha' depicts not Siddhartha Gautama but which Chinese Buddhist folk hero?

Budai is the chubby, bald, long-eared monk shown laughing, a Chinese folk figure quite separate from the historical Buddha; Western shops simply merged the two.

The 'Ye' in 'Ye Olde Shoppe' was never said 'yee'; its Y stands in for which vanished English letter?

Thorn (þ) represented the 'th' sound in Middle English, and when printers lacked the character they set a Y in its place, so 'ye' was always just 'the'.

Which Hawaiian volcano, measured from its seafloor base, is often called the tallest mountain on Earth?

Mauna Kea rises about 9,330 metres (30,610 feet) from its underwater base, a dry prominence greater than Everest's 8,849 metres above the sea.

Why can the Caesarean section not be named for Julius Caesar's own birth, whatever the legend says?

His mother lived for decades after he was born, still alive when he was 45; at the time the operation was fatal to the mother, so no survivor's son could have carried its name.

So that searchers can spot it in wreckage, what colour is an aircraft's 'black box' actually painted?

Bright orange is the rule, an outdated nickname having stuck to a box that is deliberately conspicuous; the regulations demand orange or yellow with reflective surfaces to aid recovery.

Fingernails and hair seem to keep growing on a corpse; what is actually happening to the body?

The skin dries and tightens, pulling back from the bases of nails and hairs so they look longer; nothing grows after death, since growth needs living cells.

How much sunlight does the Moon's so-called dark side receive compared with the face we always see?

About the same: the far side sees just as much of the Sun over a lunar month as the near side; it is 'dark' only in the sense of being unseen from Earth until spacecraft photographed it.

A Roman vomitorium, popularly imagined as a room for purging between courses, was actually what?

A passageway is all it was: the route beneath or behind a tier of amphitheatre seats that let a crowd pour out fast at the end of a show; nobody was being sick in it.

Strictly, 'Big Ben' at Westminster is the nickname of what, rather than of the tower itself?

The great bell is Big Ben proper, the Great Bell of the Great Clock of Westminster; the tower everyone photographs was renamed Elizabeth Tower in 2012.

Cinco de Mayo, often taken for Mexican independence day, marks an 1862 victory at Puebla over whom?

France, or rather the Second French Empire, lost the Battle of Puebla on 5 May 1862; Mexico's actual independence day falls on 16 September.

The 'koala bear' is no bear at all but belongs to which group of mammals, like its wombat cousins?

Marsupials raise their young in a pouch, and the koala is an arboreal, herbivorous one native to Australia whose nearest living relatives are the wombats.

Why did the US Supreme Court rule in 1893 that the tomato, botanically a fruit, is a vegetable?

For import tariffs: the 1893 case Nix v. Hedden turned on the Tariff Act of 1883, and the court ruled that the 'common meaning' of the words, not botany, decided what a vegetable was.

Which fifth basic taste, identified in 1908 by Kikunae Ikeda, joins sweet, sour, salty and bitter?

Umami was first scientifically identified in 1908 by Kikunae Ikeda, a professor at Tokyo Imperial University, and is now counted among the five basic tastes; 'spicy' has never made the list.