24 Popular “Facts” That Are Completely Fake

1. The "fact" that sharks don't get cancer. Completely bogus.

2. Cracking your fingers won’t give you arthritis like I was always told. I just found this out yesterday and feel like I’ve been lied to my whole life.

3. That the Sahara is the largest desert in the world.

It's Antarctica.

4. The heart shocker thing doesn't start your heart it stops it in hopes of resetting it to default.

It’s the "did you try turning it off and on" human body reboot.

5. Napoleon was actually of average height. Maybe even slightly above average.

6. That you can see the Great Wall of China from space. Yes, it’s long but it’s literally 13-15 ft wide along the top, 25ft wide at the bottom. Way too narrow to see.

You can, however, see cities from all the light pollution!

7. It takes more muscles to frown than smile.

It’s all just the same muscles. Almost any facial expression interacts with all of them in some way, just a different combination of tensing and relaxing at different intensities.

8. Humans have blue blood until it hits oxygen then it becomes red.

9. That Rasputin just wouldn't die despite being poisoned, shot, beaten, etc.

He got shot square in the forehead and, unsurprisingly, that killed him on the spot. He has an autopsy, you know.

10. That earthworms turn into two separate worms after being cut in half

They don't, so stop cutting earthworms in half, d*ckhead

11. Dogs can't look up.

12. That you need 8 glasses of water a day. You just need enough to not feel thirsty.

13. Lemmings commit mass suicide by jumping into the ocean.

14. The thing about goldfish memories being awful.

15. That we use only 10% of our brains; in reality, we use all of our brains because some activities have specific regions of the brain

16. “It takes seven years for your body to digest a piece of gum”

In reality, your body doesn’t break it down at all and will just pass the gum though with everything else.

17. You swallow about four spiders in your sleep per year. I know this isn’t true but now I have a fear that a spider is going to crawl into my mouth, nose or ear and lay eggs.

18. "Lightning never strikes twice in the same place."

(In fact, it does - and sometimes with frequency.)

19. Marilyn Monroe wasn't plus size. She was a size 16 at some point yes, but she was a size 16 in the 50s. Sizing in the 50s was very different to sizing today. A museum that bought one of her dresses found it too small to fit on a size 6 mannequin. She was thin, she was just curvy and used shapewear.

20. Albert Einstein was a fantastic student who passed his classes with flying colors. The guy analyzing his life was just confused by the Swiss grading system compared to Germany’s (one is on a scale of 1 to 6, the other is 6 to 1).

21. That you should never pick up or touch a baby bird because the mother bird will smell a human and abandon it. If the bird is healthy and you can safely reach the nest, put it back. If you happen to find the bird on the ground again, the mother bird likely pushed it out of the nest on purpose.

22. That owls can turn their heads 360 degrees. It's more like 270.

23. Paul Revere didn’t yell “the British are coming”, he didn’t even yell, he went to peoples houses and quietly notified them “the redcoats are coming”

24. That bats are blind.