Science Myths

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

22 stories

• The Warship That Never Actually Teleported to Norfolk
• Göbekli Tepe: The Temple Built Before Farming, Writing, or the Wheel
• The Myth That You Only Use 10% of Your Brain
• The Starlings America Blamed on Shakespeare — and the One Sentence That Invented the Story
• 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
• The Recipe for Making Mice Out of a Sweaty Shirt and a Jar of Wheat
• The Lemmings That Never Jumped Off the Cliff
• The Million-Dollar Space Pen Myth — and the
  28.89 Pencils NASA Actually Bought
• The Moon Golf Shot That Went 'Miles and Miles and Miles' — and Actually Went 40 Yards
• The Mummy's Curse That Missed Its Main Target
• Spontaneous Human Combustion: The Myth That Refused to Burn Out
• The Frozen Chicken Cannon That Supposedly Wrecked a British Train
• The Duck Borrowed From a Farm to Prove That Quacks Do Echo
• The Chess-Playing Machine That Beat Napoleon (With a Man Hidden Inside)
• The Children's Toy That Came With Four Jars of Uranium — and Flopped Because of the Price
• The Army Captain Who Asked Congress to Fund a Trip Inside the Earth
• 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 14-Year-Old Who Convinced 43 Classmates to Ban Water

← All series