Myth - Debunk It

Are we really Right Brained or Left Brained? A time-old way of categorizing someone’s personality is to determine whether that individual is “right-brained” or left-brained” — right-brained people are thought to be more spontaneous, creative, and artistic, while left-brainers are associated with being more logical, detail-oriented, analytical . Too bad it's not true . So where did this whole left brain vs. right brain idea start? It was born back in the 60s when a Nobel Prize-winning neuro-psychologist named Roger Sperry cut the hemisphere-connecting brain fibers in a number of epilepsy patients to reduce their seizures. Then he decided to run an experiment to compare how the right and left hemispheres processed information differently , and his study marked the beginning of the right-brain left-brain myth that would persist through the years. Trouble is, science never really supported this notion after that. More recently, brain scan technology has revealed ...

Does Gum Really Take 7 Years to Digest? Maybe you couldn't find a nearby trashcan, or perhaps you were enjoying the taste just a little too much. Whatever the case, you did what most of us have done at one point or another: You swallowed your chewing gum . It's only then that a refrain from childhood echoes through your mind: "Don't swallow chewing gum—it will stay in your system for seven years!" Thankfully the legend is false . As gastroenterologist Dr. Rodger Liddle of the Duke University School of Medicine explained to Scientific American: " Nothing would reside that long unless it was so large it couldn't get out of the stomach or it was trapped in the intestine." Chewing gum consists of a gum base, sweetener, flavoring, preservatives and softeners . Sugars and flavoring ingredients such as mint oils break down easily and are soon excreted. Likewise, softeners such as vegetable oil or glycerine don’t present a problem for the ...

Can a Penny or any coin dropped from a tall Skyscraper kill you? You’ve probably heard people say how if you drop a penny off the top of the Empire State Building , it will accelerate to such a speed that if it struck someone, it would kill them . This simply isn’t true at all , not by a long shot. A penny only weighs about a gram and it tumbles as it falls. Because of the tumbling and the light weight , there's so much air resistance that the penny never really gathers that much speed before it hits its terminal velocity . A gram of weight traveling at a relatively slow speed might hurt a little if it hit you on the head, but it's not going to kill you. Pennies are flat, so they experience a lot of air resistance, and they are light, so it doesn't take much drag to counteract their weight . Thus, if hurled off a skyscraper, pennies achieve their terminal velocity after only about 50 feet (15 meters) of descent . After that point, they flutter to th...

Are Diamonds really rare and valuable? Diamonds are our most popular gemstone . That hasn’t always been the case. It was only in the last century that diamonds became readily available. Prior to that, rubies and sapphires were the most popular gems, especially for engagement rings. All gem grade materials are rare, composing just a tiny fraction of the earth. However, among gems, diamonds are actually the most common. If you doubt this ask yourself; “How many women do you know that do not own at least one diamond?” Now ask the same question about other gems. And the common belief that diamonds are inherently valuable? It’s just not true . In fact, reselling a diamond for top dollar isn’t all that easy. Once you leave the jewelry shop after buying a diamond, it loses 50% of its value. It’s what economists call a thin market. One diamond cartel, De Beers, has artificially driven up the price of diamonds for decades. A 1920s advertising campaign set a cultural ex...

Could T. Rex Really Only See You If You Moved? It’s a question that has plagued moviegoers since Jurassic Park was released in 1993: Could a T. Rex really only see you if you moved? Thanks to researchers at the University of Oregon, that question could finally be answered. University of Oregon researcher Professor Kent Stevens began a project called “DinoMorph” in 1993 which set out to generate digital models of various theropod dinosaurs, including the infamous Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptors. Theropods were bipedal, flesh-eating dinosaurs with short forelimbs. The idea of the project was to recreate the visualizations of these animals. To do this, Stevens effectively turned a technique used to measure and assess visual fields, called perimetry, inside out. This novel technique, called inverse perimetry, involved the use of taxidermic eyes, a laser and a glass plate which together allowed Stevens to estimate whether a particular object would be visible at v...

Did Einstein fail at school? At the end of the 20th Century, Time magazine voted Albert Einstein to be the Man of The Century. He authored four papers that changed our understanding of the way the universe works. Generations of school kids have consoled themselves over their poor school marks with the belief that Einstein failed at school. Some motivational speakers also make this claim - but this is wrong. The truth is, Einstein seemed to relish problem solving, and little else. Despite minor troubles in French and the Humanities, Einstein was a prodigy in math and physics from a young age. He loathed the busy work of a typical school day and dropped out when he was 15. This rumor actually started while he was still alive and even showed up in a particular issue of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. Einstein reportedly found the article humorous and remarked: ““I never failed in mathematics… Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus.” ...

Why do people keep saying that “It’s just a Theory!” When someone says things like, “I have a theory on why things fall down, it is because of the robots from the underground pull things with giant magnets”, it is a hypothesis that is not proven and it certainly is not a theory. First let us get something straight, words like fact, theory, hypothesis and law mean something completely different. Facts are observations of the world around us. There are many laws that state ‘how’ things happen, but we don’t know ‘why’ it happens as the way it does. We develop explanations for these observations, called a hypothesis. When enough of the hypotheses on the same subject have been confirmed, there you have a theory. It is not a simple process. Being a theory isn’t a bad thing, it means that the idea has passed the toughest tests we can throw at it. The next time someone comments that something is “just a theory” for things like Evolution and Climate Change, say ...