Science Myths

The 10% brain myth, bat-people on the Moon, lemmings that never jumped off cliffs.

38 stories

• George Washington's Wooden Teeth — Which Were Never Made of Wood
• The Brandy Barrel St. Bernards Never Carried — and Why It Would Have Made Things Worse
• The 'World's Most Venomous Spider' That Couldn't Bite You — So a MythBuster Let It Try
• The Misplaced Decimal Point That Made Spinach Famous — and Never Existed
• The Easter Island Statues That 'Walked' to Work — and the 18 People Who Took One for a Stroll
• The Fizzing Candy That Supposedly Exploded Kids' Stomachs — and the 50,000 Letters Sent to Say It Didn't
• The Library Supposedly Sinking Because the Architect Forgot About the Books
• The MSG Panic a Surgeon Confessed to Starting on a $10 Bet — Over a Letter He Probably Didn't Write
• The Space Shuttle Boosters Supposedly Sized by the Rear Ends of Two Roman Horses
• The Bumblebee That Science Supposedly Proved Couldn't Fly
• The Doctor Who Cracked the Knuckles of Only One Hand for 60 Years to Prove His Mother Wrong
• The Night-Fighter Ace Whose Secret Radar Got Blamed on Carrots
• The Great Wall 'Visible From the Moon' — Promised 215 Years Before Anyone Could Check
• The 3,000-Year-Old Pharaoh Who Flew to Paris for a Fungus Treatment — Without a Passport
• The Baguette Blamed for Overheating the Large Hadron Collider
• The Opera Costume Designer Who Put Horns on the Vikings
• The 14-Year-Old Who Convinced 43 Classmates to Ban Water
• The Children's Toy That Came With Four Jars of Uranium — and Flopped Because of the Price
• The Frozen Chicken Cannon That Supposedly Wrecked a British Train
• The Moon Golf Shot That Went 'Miles and Miles and Miles' — and Actually Went 40 Yards
• The Starlings America Blamed on Shakespeare — and the One Sentence That Invented the Story
• The Duck Borrowed From a Farm to Prove That Quacks Do Echo
• The Recipe for Making Mice Out of a Sweaty Shirt and a Jar of Wheat
• The Army Captain Who Asked Congress to Fund a Trip Inside the Earth
• The Mummy's Curse That Missed Its Main Target
• The Million-Dollar Space Pen Myth — and the $128.89 Pencils NASA Actually Bought
• The Astronomer Who Saw Canals on Mars That Weren't Real
• The Baghdad Battery: The 2,000-Year-Old 'Battery' That Probably Never Held a Charge
• The Bathtub That Took 24 Hours to Drain to Test a Myth
• The Chess-Playing Machine That Beat Napoleon (With a Man Hidden Inside)
• The Lemmings That Never Jumped Off the Cliff
• Spontaneous Human Combustion: The Myth That Refused to Burn Out
• The Newspaper Hoax That Put Bat-People on the Moon
• The Park Ranger Struck by Lightning Seven Times
• The Petrified Giant That Was a Fake of a Fake
• Göbekli Tepe: The Temple Built Before Farming, Writing, or the Wheel
• The Myth That You Only Use 10% of Your Brain
• The Warship That Never Actually Teleported to Norfolk

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