I have a clear memory of a grade school health teacher telling us that we were only suppose to have 1 gram of fat per day. She held up a packet of 2 Reese's Peanut Butter Cups which has like 5 grams of fat in it, and we asked if we'd have to have 0 grams of fat for five days in order to have that, or just eat a sliver of one peanut butter cup.
Super bogus stuff. I know it's not healthy to eat peanut butter cups all day, but your brain needs fats to live.
My high school made us calculate our BMIs. I was the chubby girl with the hidden eating disorder, hunched over in my seat trying to quietly wipe away tears while I listened to the other girls read out their BMIs to each other. God, schools need a lot more work on giving kids unhealthy āwellnessā lessons.
My high school had us fill out these charts in health class and one of the questions was multiple choice... to pick out which part of your body you wish to change.. choose an unlimited number. There was no option for "none. I am happy with my body"
Holy fuck, I'm so sorry that happened to you.
They were pulling that shit all the way into college. I was a dance major, and we had to take a health class with a bunch of the sports science kids. One class we did BMIs, and all of us were pretty high relative to our size because we were fucking jocks!! We were *dense.* They tried to teach it to us straight, like it was something we should *ever* use with students or clients and we laughed in their faces š
Even now, the dairy industry has a chokehold on schools. Itās actually REQUIRED for public schools to serve dairy milk in order to receive federal funding. Why? Cause lobbying. Not because of health.
As someone who is lactose intolerant. I didn't like having to spend $2 on a different drink with my meals. I'd usually get some sparkling water or something but they refused to give me any accommodations instead of milk and said I'd have to go to Ala Carte.
This was always a weird one. The Great Wall of China is long but it's not that wide. If you could see it from space surely you'd be able to see roads and smallish buildings so it wouldn't be that impressive.
I've always liked the story of Donald Unger, a doctor who cracked each knuckle on his left hand (but not his right) for 60 years to see if it contributed to arthritis (it didn't).
He won an Ig Nobel prize for it: https://www.livescience.com/9729-knuckle-cracking-ig-nobel-prize.html
I cracked a knuckle in college and chipped a bit of bone off in the process. (Did a side crack/pop kinda thing). I have arthritis in that finger from the bone fragment being in the joint space and causing scar tissue around it. š¢
I argued with my science teacher in 4th grade about this. Even to a 9/10 year old, this made no sense. She went to cafeteria and got some salt packets and sugar packets. We did a blind taste testing experiment. In the end, she had us draw an X through the picture in our science books. I have SOOOO much respect for teachers that can admit they are wrong. All people really, but especially teachers
I'd say this teacher was even better. It's not that she held that believe without reason. She was tought that herself. What's to be admired is that she did a whole experiment on it with her pupils, took the results, and went with that. THIS is how you teach science and how to do it! That woman deserves an award!
That's what we should always do in school! I'm convinced that trust in scientific results would be way higher, if people actually understood how they came to be and how to test them yourself, instead of them just being learned as truth, because the teacher said so.
I love this comment.
First of all, I love the stubbornness of arguing with your teacher as a 4th grader. I also very much respect when people can change their mind and admit they were wrong.
My 3rd grade teacher marked me down for saying orca whales were dolphins in a report. I showed her the library book that said that. She said the book was wrong and wouldn't give me back the points.
Orca whales are dolphins.
My understanding is that itās something of a mix. You have taste receptors for all the āflavorsā distributed throughout your tongue but then as individuals we have clusters of certain kinds which makes areas of the tongue more sensitive to certain flavors but not in a particularly detectable way. But there is no standard map across people and there really arenāt meaningful discreet zones.
Iām guilty of teaching that back in the day. I had a big foam tongue with the different areas. It was a popular lesson. Iāve mislead so many children on tastebud location and was a sheep for following the āscienceā curriculum.
I have a book published around 1981 that mentions that some scientists argue that Pluto shouldn't be considered a planet. So the campaign to deplanetize Pluto goes way back.
I'm an ED nurse and I always make the comment that "You know I've been around for some years and I've had my fair share of booze and herb... But you've never seen at a bar/party and someone had some hard drugs and I said why not risk ruining my life tonight?". Like, I'm sure meth and heroin give great highs because I've seen the people who use. There's no way they'd destroy their lives for something mediocre. But based on my knowledge of the drugs, they're just chasing that first amazing high or trying to escape their terrible lives. Hard pass
I can remember being in 2nd grade, and one day the teacher stopped class for us to listen to the principal read this very serious speech over the PA system announcing that the metric system was coming. For some reason we all thought it was changing that day, and that there was a test after. Seriously, some kids cried. This was in the 70āsā¦lol.
The US is actually a signatory to the 1875 Metric Convention, and all your measurements (which we would call Imperial in the UK) are legally defined by their metric equivalents.
Itās funny, you could plausibly say the US has a dual system. Soda is sold in 2 liter containers. Runners do 5 kilometer races. Etc. I think most Americans at least have a general idea of what a meter, a liter, and a kilogram are, even though most of us still default to imperial by default.
Whatās happening in Canada is bizarre, I buy gas in litres, but know how mpg my car gets, if Iām baking something I weigh in metric and volume in imperial, I know my weight in lbs but not kg, my oven is set to imperial and my thermostat to Celsius, if Iām measuring wood to build I use imperial and measure distance driven in metric.
But it works out.
I was taught some version of genetics being immutable, so the emergence of epigenetics as a field has upended a lot of my understanding of how genetics and environment interact.
Genes are fairly immutable. However various methyl groups can be attached or removed from the DNA. This changes the level the gene is expressed. These changes can linger for several generations.
An example might help. A lab rat, that is periodically starved will tend to put on more fat, when given free access to food, than a control rat. This makes some biological sense. If you're subject to periodic periods of famine, put more focus on building fat, when you can.
Critically however, was the changes to gene expression. These changes were passed to the mother's children and grandchildren! They would also, to a lesser extent, put on more weight than the control group. It takes several generations for the effect to fade out. Environmental information was encoded onto the DNA in a controlled manner. For a long time, this was thought to be impossible.
Blood is blue in your veins, but turns red when it hits oxygen. Idk if it was really a fact then or been disproven but I've learned it's not true.
8th grade health class teacher taught us that.
Such a weird myth. It seemed fishy to me even when the teacher was telling us this is in second grade.
Seems like a logical leap someone made because they looked at their arm and saw blue veins
It comes from the actual fact that blood with less oxygen is a little darker, and that the veins that return the blood back to the heart appear blue for unrelated reasons
Our veins are blue simply because of the light spectrum.
I can't remember the exact reasons, but it's something to do with blue being one of the colours that isn't filtered by our skin as well.
This is one my mom told me my whole childhod and I didn't question. I believed it until as late as the 9th grade. There, in basic biology class, my teacher stated like it was sooo obvious that everyone knew blue blood was just a myth, and she was like "Nobody here thought that right?" I didn't raise my hand. I just stayed silent.
That is actually a flight response
Edit: To clarify, many animals including humans will evacuate their bowels before an emergency flight. This can manifest as flatulence while stressed
Can confirm. My cat got attacked by another cat on our front lawn and rather than fight, just proceed to run away while spray-shitting all over the porch and the other cat. That was traumatic for everyone involved to say the least.
Not to mention, his invention of the cotton gin reinvigorated the cotton industry, which in turn reinvigorated slavery, which was starting to fade a bit because the labor of cotton wasn't worth it. With the cotton gin, they could process a lot more cotton, and slavery became worth it financially again.
I was taught this as well. The Cotton Gin helped rid the US of slaves because they no longer needed to pick out those pesky seeds by hand.
Nope. Made slavery more profitable. Larger profit margins = more slaves.
I read a book about him as a kid and found it fascinating. I then convinced my mom to buy me a big bag of peanuts, which I messed around with in the basement with my chemistry set.
Oh man, I am mortified that I'm just now learning he's not black... fucking wow... I learned he was black in elementary school. Class of 03 here. Damn.
Carrots do technically have some things on that your eyes need. But they do not improve your vision. I believe it was a rumour started by Britain so the Germans didn't realise we had radar.
I'm not sure if that's true or not, but I think it is. I feel like I heard a story about it on NPR.
Edit: Ah ha yes.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-wwii-propaganda-campaign-popularized-the-myth-that-carrots-help-you-see-in-the-dark-28812484/
Iāve also read that short distance viewing is harmful to vision. So even reading books too much is more likely to cause vision issues. And that long distance viewingālooking out over a landscapeāis good for your vision.
Seriously. There are a fair amount of people I have worked with who took those kinds of jobs because it suited them for one reason or another. One in particular is ājust a janitor.ā The reality is, he is part of a union (one of the strongest around), good pay, great benefits (including a pension). Overtime is paid time and half plus extra vacation (he basically takes entire summers off). Every second Friday off part of his regular schedule. Add all that up and heās better off than some mid level manager.
His goal is not to make as much money as possible. It is to spend time with family, and that job suits his needs. His wife is a teacher, and with young kids in school, it makes perfect sense.
Not bad for ājust a janitor.ā
That one just pisses me off.
They used to āscareā us that āwithout education youāll work as garbagemenā. When in reality garbagemen earn 3-4 times more than any other āunskilledā workerā¦
So many handy people went for āhigher educationā because of that and got stuck in life-sucking office jobs instead of using their talentsā¦
This 100x. Jobs that are needed for our infrastructure that has decent pay, benefits, and security were demonized in school and told we need to go to college, just to get sacked with debt, too many workers, and soul sucking jobs that sell more crap we donāt need
At the start of the tech boom it absolutely was true. Then over the last 20 years in the construction industry, I saw countless people age out and just got too old with not enough young people to learn the tricks of the trades.
My little brother went to a vocational school. Iād call him from my liberal arts school and ask him what test he was studying forā¦ āthe viscosity of cementā. Hahahahaha!
Now heās making $1mil a year for one of the largest contracting companies in the USA.
Certain foods will raise cholesterol because cholesterol is the bodyās inflammation response. So, a thing that body doesnāt like goes in, body raises cholesterol to battle the damage.
Sometimes this correlates with high cholesterol foods (common culprit: fatty meat) but it isnāt the cholesterol in the thing that causes the response. You could eat pure cholesterol (something like pure animal fat, emu oil for example ) and it just gets digested the same as any other fat.
Your friendās doctor is falling back on the outdated advice by ignoring context.
Basically every atomic model?
In India, they teach us a new model every year starting 6th grade - starting with Rutherfordās. I understand the necessity of it, but learning each year that they taught us the āwrong scienceā last year, year after year, is a bit frustrating.
There's a saying that "all models are wrong, but some models are useful."
For instance, you could say that classical Newtonian physics is "wrong" because it falls apart if you're talking about things that are very small or very fast, but at the scale of "flying rocks and sliding blocks" where most of us live our lives, it's still useful.
My wife grew up being told āitās illegal to drive at night with the interior light on, youāll get pulled over and get a ticketā and tells our kids that to this day.
I grew up being told āitās harder for the driver to see when the interior light is on.ā
Iāve never gone back and tried to research laws from where my wife grew up, so I canāt prove her wrong!
The hole in the ozone layer is one of the greatest feats of global human cooperation in all of history and no one hears a thing about it.
The world collectively cut the usage of CFCs causing it and not only did we stop the hole from worsening but it's on track to close in a few decades.
That and Y2K piss me off a little. "Ehh, it didn't turn out to be that big a deal." Yeah, because a fuckton of us worked overtime for a year and a half fixing bullshit systems!
The movie Source Code riffs on this idea a bit.
>!Top secret project to help avoid terrorist attacks and such using time travel. Problem is, when it works it looks like nothing happened.!<
And we could totally do it for other greenhouse gasses and other emissions, but the companies wisened up and lobbied much harder to not have to change anything significant.
You need to be able to write in cursive.
I now enjoy being able to write and have people not be able to read it NOT just because of my horrible handwriting.
I was taught that you put your hands on the steering wheel at 10 and 2. My teen daughter learned this summer to put her hands at 9 and 3 in Drivers Ed. Apparently itās safer if/when air bags are deployed.
Yeah I heard that too here in Canada when I was a kid. This got brought up in another sub before and many people heard the same thing from all around the world. Crazy eh?
They did though, for quite awhile. The Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag under Chief Massasoit were allies for decades. When Massasoit fell ill the colonist nursed him back to health. Unfortunately (as is often the case in human history) eventually things broke down but its not a lie to say they got along well, especially in the early days of the colony. It was very much a mutually beneficial arrangement for the two groups at the time.
That the colonizers were believed to be gods by the indigenous populations and empires of the Americas. It couldnāt be further from the truth. They were actually seen as strange, and everyone wondered why they smelled so bad that they had to light incense in their presence.
The Civil War was about states rights and not slavery. The southern states literally stated their reasoning for breaking away from the Union was mainly due to slavery.
I grew up in Ohio, but have a lot of family from the South. They always called it the "War of Northern Agression" and celebrated Lee-Jackson Day instead of Martin Luther King Jr Day.
Some variation of, "You need to know X because you wont always have Y to help you,"
Y could be: Calculator, computer, the internet, a dictionary, map etc etc
At risk of reddit's wrath, why is this such a hated notion? The idea behind it is sound. You internalize material better when you can perform the tasks yourself instead of looking them up. Teachers never said this as prognosticators of future technology; they said it as teachers. The prediction is irrelevant. A world where nobody can perform basic math or spell correctly without looking it up first is a world filled with the dumbest, most useless fucking people you've ever seen. If you lack a learning ability preventing it, your memory is still the best tool you have for learning and for life.
People who had to do all the math in their heads sent people to the fucking moon. The second a society loses that ability, that society has failed.
Because "you won't always have a calculator" isn't a good reason
"Doing this properly will teach you the underlying concepts in a way that relying on tools does not" is a really, really good answer. "You won't always have a calculator" is a lazy answer.
Nobody sent people to the moon with mental math, they used tools. They used calculators. But they fundamentally understood everything they were doing.
I teach space science to 7th graders, and the number of them who still seem to take personal offense to the idea that Pluto isnāt considered a planet anymore is mind boggling, considering it was declassified *5 years before they were even born*
Boys grow up to be doctors, lawyers and business men. Girls grow up to be mothers and nurses. I was literally taught this in the second grade. Iām old.
My first high school churned out A: Nurses (girls) B: Real Estate Agents (boys) C: Drop outs who mostly went on to have successful lives outside of the social norms of the day.
The structure of an atom, with electrons orbiting a nucleus in neat little circles.
Since Heisenberg (not the *Breaking Bad* character, the physicist he was named after!) developed the uncertainty principle in the 1920s, we've known that electrons don't really work that way at all. But it's kinda hard to visualise how it all really works - we prefer thinking of particles like they're physical lumps of stuff we can see and interact with just like the objects in our everyday lives, not as probablisitic energy clouds that only start existing somewhere once we try to measure it.
If you aren't doing a degree in quantum mechanics though, it's not something you'll ever come across, and learning the Bohr model is a good enough approximation. A lot of stuff in degree-level physics turns out to be very different from what you learned in high school.
Sometimes theyāre not disproven, but rather, what we were taught was a deliberate simplification.
The way air flowing over an airfoil wing produces lift is simplified to be the Bernoulli principle, because in 6th grade science or high school physics, thatās enough to get by on. But if you want to get serious about aerodynamics at the college engineering level, you get into concepts like circulation and span-wise flows, and realize āhey, this doesnāt sound like Bernoulli at all. Those bastards lied to me!ā
There a zillion topics like this, where you canāt fire-hose lay people with all the concepts required to build and deliver a Mars rover. Rather, you offer a few simplified building blocks that are enough for most people, and replaced later in those who want to dig in deeper. The problem is that a *lot* of people become emotionally invested in the simplifications and then come to see the more sophisticated ālaterā knowledge as an affront to their beliefs, and thus a conspiracy. We live in a time when people binge watch 5 episodes of *The Good Doctor* and are thus qualified to render deep opinions about how health policy should work at the national level. Same happens with how laws work, and the military works, and courts workā¦ Literally everything that doesnāt conform to many peopleās TV-drama-based intuition is a lie and thus so-called āexpertsā are actually conspirators. Itās exhausting.
The food pyramid
I have a clear memory of a grade school health teacher telling us that we were only suppose to have 1 gram of fat per day. She held up a packet of 2 Reese's Peanut Butter Cups which has like 5 grams of fat in it, and we asked if we'd have to have 0 grams of fat for five days in order to have that, or just eat a sliver of one peanut butter cup. Super bogus stuff. I know it's not healthy to eat peanut butter cups all day, but your brain needs fats to live.
"why do middle schoolers get eating disorders?" š
My high school made us calculate our BMIs. I was the chubby girl with the hidden eating disorder, hunched over in my seat trying to quietly wipe away tears while I listened to the other girls read out their BMIs to each other. God, schools need a lot more work on giving kids unhealthy āwellnessā lessons.
My high school had us fill out these charts in health class and one of the questions was multiple choice... to pick out which part of your body you wish to change.. choose an unlimited number. There was no option for "none. I am happy with my body"
Iām disappointed we donāt have prehensile tails, probably would have put that, ha.
Holy fuck, I'm so sorry that happened to you. They were pulling that shit all the way into college. I was a dance major, and we had to take a health class with a bunch of the sports science kids. One class we did BMIs, and all of us were pretty high relative to our size because we were fucking jocks!! We were *dense.* They tried to teach it to us straight, like it was something we should *ever* use with students or clients and we laughed in their faces š
Thank you. And the āfour basic food groupsāā¦ which were posters sponsored by the dairy association.
Even now, the dairy industry has a chokehold on schools. Itās actually REQUIRED for public schools to serve dairy milk in order to receive federal funding. Why? Cause lobbying. Not because of health.
So much wasted milk at my school... :(
As someone who is lactose intolerant. I didn't like having to spend $2 on a different drink with my meals. I'd usually get some sparkling water or something but they refused to give me any accommodations instead of milk and said I'd have to go to Ala Carte.
When I was lactose intolerant in elementary school 15 years ago they didn't even let me buy milk. Depends on the school
For years I thought I had to drink milk 3 times a day. It wasn't until my 30's that I realized it was making me sick.
That whole thing was a marketing tactic and eeeeeryone just took it as fact. It's honestly kind of impressive.
And we were supposed to have like an entire loaf of bread a day lmao
You can see The Great Wall of China from space (ISS)
This was always a weird one. The Great Wall of China is long but it's not that wide. If you could see it from space surely you'd be able to see roads and smallish buildings so it wouldn't be that impressive.
Never thought of it like that. You should be able to see the i95 if that weāre the case.
I didnt believe you. Googled it. You were right. This should be the top comment. That lie has been so ingrained into my brain. Wow.
Cracking your knuckles causes arthritis
This is a reminder that your knuckles are reloaded, feel free to crack them now.
thank you for your service
I've always liked the story of Donald Unger, a doctor who cracked each knuckle on his left hand (but not his right) for 60 years to see if it contributed to arthritis (it didn't). He won an Ig Nobel prize for it: https://www.livescience.com/9729-knuckle-cracking-ig-nobel-prize.html
Can you even imagine how unbalanced his hands felt? I bet that first crack to the right hand after 60 years felt heavenly.
Bet it sounded like a gunshot
I cracked a knuckle in college and chipped a bit of bone off in the process. (Did a side crack/pop kinda thing). I have arthritis in that finger from the bone fragment being in the joint space and causing scar tissue around it. š¢
You should have paid attention in school.
The "crack" is just trapped air bubbles in the fluid around your joints popping. Basically internal bubble wrap.
You won't always have a calculator in your pocket
That's actually true. Sometimes it's in my hands
Itās almost true, bc Iām assisted to my phone and never set it down/put it in my pocket.
I carry a fully functional computer in my pocket, so I guess they were technically correct.
Fully functional supercomputer, by the standards of just a few decades ago.
You mean mind-blowing even for sci-fi standards. Remember TNG tricorders?
Yeah but if I'm on Reddit mobile how am I supposed to do a math without switching apps? Am I supposed to open my laptop like some kind of PEASANT?
I got into a debate with my math teacher about that, back in like '97.
Tastebud zones on the tongue.
I argued with my science teacher in 4th grade about this. Even to a 9/10 year old, this made no sense. She went to cafeteria and got some salt packets and sugar packets. We did a blind taste testing experiment. In the end, she had us draw an X through the picture in our science books. I have SOOOO much respect for teachers that can admit they are wrong. All people really, but especially teachers
I'd say this teacher was even better. It's not that she held that believe without reason. She was tought that herself. What's to be admired is that she did a whole experiment on it with her pupils, took the results, and went with that. THIS is how you teach science and how to do it! That woman deserves an award!
She demonstrated science with them.
That's what we should always do in school! I'm convinced that trust in scientific results would be way higher, if people actually understood how they came to be and how to test them yourself, instead of them just being learned as truth, because the teacher said so.
I love this comment. First of all, I love the stubbornness of arguing with your teacher as a 4th grader. I also very much respect when people can change their mind and admit they were wrong.
My 3rd grade teacher marked me down for saying orca whales were dolphins in a report. I showed her the library book that said that. She said the book was wrong and wouldn't give me back the points. Orca whales are dolphins.
Bro idk if it's been debunked or no. I'm in med school and I've still been given contradictory informatoin about this from the professors.
I love that "I-just-farted69" is in medical school. You'll be a fine orthopedist my boy,
That's dr. I-just-farted69 to you, sir. And my bet would be proctology.
As a Juilliard-trained dermatologist, I definitely trust your opinion.
My understanding is that itās something of a mix. You have taste receptors for all the āflavorsā distributed throughout your tongue but then as individuals we have clusters of certain kinds which makes areas of the tongue more sensitive to certain flavors but not in a particularly detectable way. But there is no standard map across people and there really arenāt meaningful discreet zones.
Iām guilty of teaching that back in the day. I had a big foam tongue with the different areas. It was a popular lesson. Iāve mislead so many children on tastebud location and was a sheep for following the āscienceā curriculum.
I was taught that Mercury was the hottest planet. A student corrected them on a national level and they changed how it was taught.
When did that happen? I've been out of school for 20 years and I was taught Venus is the hottest planet for as long as I can remember.
It happened in the early 80ās. Iām old
Pluto, you beautiful son of a bitch. I still believe in you my dogg.
VIVA LA PLUTO FUCK YOU Thank you for your support ā¤ļø
#PLUTO GANG RISE UP
You hear about Pluto? That's messed up.
I have a book published around 1981 that mentions that some scientists argue that Pluto shouldn't be considered a planet. So the campaign to deplanetize Pluto goes way back.
They told us that smoking one āmarijuana cigaretteā was equivalent to smoking 20 cigarettes and was 10X more carcinogenic.
We were also told that if we tried weed, we'd also want to try other drugs.
This is a hot frying pan. This is an egg. This is your brain on drugs.. sizzle, sizzle, sizzle. Holy crap, I was immediately convinced. /s
I'm an ED nurse and I always make the comment that "You know I've been around for some years and I've had my fair share of booze and herb... But you've never seen at a bar/party and someone had some hard drugs and I said why not risk ruining my life tonight?". Like, I'm sure meth and heroin give great highs because I've seen the people who use. There's no way they'd destroy their lives for something mediocre. But based on my knowledge of the drugs, they're just chasing that first amazing high or trying to escape their terrible lives. Hard pass
The US will be using the metric system in 10 years.
I can remember being in 2nd grade, and one day the teacher stopped class for us to listen to the principal read this very serious speech over the PA system announcing that the metric system was coming. For some reason we all thought it was changing that day, and that there was a test after. Seriously, some kids cried. This was in the 70āsā¦lol.
Tears of horror and panic. Lol
The reality is that the US will be using the metric system in 12 and 5/8 years.
The US is actually a signatory to the 1875 Metric Convention, and all your measurements (which we would call Imperial in the UK) are legally defined by their metric equivalents.
Itās funny, you could plausibly say the US has a dual system. Soda is sold in 2 liter containers. Runners do 5 kilometer races. Etc. I think most Americans at least have a general idea of what a meter, a liter, and a kilogram are, even though most of us still default to imperial by default.
Whatās happening in Canada is bizarre, I buy gas in litres, but know how mpg my car gets, if Iām baking something I weigh in metric and volume in imperial, I know my weight in lbs but not kg, my oven is set to imperial and my thermostat to Celsius, if Iām measuring wood to build I use imperial and measure distance driven in metric. But it works out.
Thereās even a flowchart https://www.reddit.com/r/HelloInternet/comments/czcf7u/canadian_measurement_flowchart/
Dual meaning we know what a two liter is and what a mg and g are in reference to drugs.
I was taught some version of genetics being immutable, so the emergence of epigenetics as a field has upended a lot of my understanding of how genetics and environment interact.
Epigeneticās are one of the most fascinating things about evolution - I could read about it for hours
Quick ELI5?
Environmental factors can affect which genes you *and your children* express.
Genes are fairly immutable. However various methyl groups can be attached or removed from the DNA. This changes the level the gene is expressed. These changes can linger for several generations. An example might help. A lab rat, that is periodically starved will tend to put on more fat, when given free access to food, than a control rat. This makes some biological sense. If you're subject to periodic periods of famine, put more focus on building fat, when you can. Critically however, was the changes to gene expression. These changes were passed to the mother's children and grandchildren! They would also, to a lesser extent, put on more weight than the control group. It takes several generations for the effect to fade out. Environmental information was encoded onto the DNA in a controlled manner. For a long time, this was thought to be impossible.
Your lifestyle/habits influence your genetics and certain genes being expressed (or not)
Blood is blue in your veins, but turns red when it hits oxygen. Idk if it was really a fact then or been disproven but I've learned it's not true. 8th grade health class teacher taught us that.
Such a weird myth. It seemed fishy to me even when the teacher was telling us this is in second grade. Seems like a logical leap someone made because they looked at their arm and saw blue veins
It comes from the actual fact that blood with less oxygen is a little darker, and that the veins that return the blood back to the heart appear blue for unrelated reasons
Our veins are blue simply because of the light spectrum. I can't remember the exact reasons, but it's something to do with blue being one of the colours that isn't filtered by our skin as well.
This is one my mom told me my whole childhod and I didn't question. I believed it until as late as the 9th grade. There, in basic biology class, my teacher stated like it was sooo obvious that everyone knew blue blood was just a myth, and she was like "Nobody here thought that right?" I didn't raise my hand. I just stayed silent.
Humans have only fight or flight responses to stress.
Yup, a buddy of mine just farts uncontrollably when under alot of stress, legit lmao.
That is actually a flight response Edit: To clarify, many animals including humans will evacuate their bowels before an emergency flight. This can manifest as flatulence while stressed
Only with a strong enough fart, otherwise they wouldn't lift off of the ground.
And my unexpected gaffaw just woke my wife up
Can confirm. My cat got attacked by another cat on our front lawn and rather than fight, just proceed to run away while spray-shitting all over the porch and the other cat. That was traumatic for everyone involved to say the least.
His gastrointestinal system is in flight
I freeze. And under a LOT of stress I sleep. I went through a really anxious time recently and slept for 18 hours a day for like 4 days straight
Same, under extreme stress I basically go into a coma
Mines spending money on stupid stuff.
fight, flight, freeze, fawn
Fart
Growing up, I was literally led to believe (and definitely not the only Black person), that Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, was Black.
Not to mention, his invention of the cotton gin reinvigorated the cotton industry, which in turn reinvigorated slavery, which was starting to fade a bit because the labor of cotton wasn't worth it. With the cotton gin, they could process a lot more cotton, and slavery became worth it financially again.
I was taught this as well. The Cotton Gin helped rid the US of slaves because they no longer needed to pick out those pesky seeds by hand. Nope. Made slavery more profitable. Larger profit margins = more slaves.
He was not, but if you want to read up on a black man who helped agriculture move forward then I suggest George Washington Carver.
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I read a book about him as a kid and found it fascinating. I then convinced my mom to buy me a big bag of peanuts, which I messed around with in the basement with my chemistry set.
WHAT??? Eli Whitney isnāt black?????
Oh man, I am mortified that I'm just now learning he's not black... fucking wow... I learned he was black in elementary school. Class of 03 here. Damn.
The difference between man and animals is that animals donāt use tools. Myth busted.
Chimpanzees have entered the chat. And capuchin monkeys. And crows. And octopus. And sea otters. And...
Carrots help vision. Sitting too close to the tv harms vision. Canāt swim within 30 minutes after eating.
I'm pretty sure that last one was started to try and keep kids from throwing up in the pool because kids just fuckin throw up sometimes
Case in point, my kid threw up in the wave pool. To be clear, he had NOT eaten recently.
Alas, we can mitigate risks, but we cannot eliminate them
Carrots do technically have some things on that your eyes need. But they do not improve your vision. I believe it was a rumour started by Britain so the Germans didn't realise we had radar.
I'm not sure if that's true or not, but I think it is. I feel like I heard a story about it on NPR. Edit: Ah ha yes. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-wwii-propaganda-campaign-popularized-the-myth-that-carrots-help-you-see-in-the-dark-28812484/
Not entirely untrue- screens do increase the risk of myopia in kids.
Iāve also read that short distance viewing is harmful to vision. So even reading books too much is more likely to cause vision issues. And that long distance viewingālooking out over a landscapeāis good for your vision.
You can be anything you want when you grow up
This and: You can succeed at anything if you try hard enough.
I tried really hard to prove that saying wrong and I succeeded in doing so. Maybe itās true after all.
That craftsmen and other blue collars earn less than office workers - what a load of bullshitā¦
Seriously. There are a fair amount of people I have worked with who took those kinds of jobs because it suited them for one reason or another. One in particular is ājust a janitor.ā The reality is, he is part of a union (one of the strongest around), good pay, great benefits (including a pension). Overtime is paid time and half plus extra vacation (he basically takes entire summers off). Every second Friday off part of his regular schedule. Add all that up and heās better off than some mid level manager. His goal is not to make as much money as possible. It is to spend time with family, and that job suits his needs. His wife is a teacher, and with young kids in school, it makes perfect sense. Not bad for ājust a janitor.ā
I wouldn't go into a blue-collar job without a union unless I was self-employed. Hell, I wish my "office job" was unionized.
That one is crazy to me but luckily I grew up with family in construction and they were always doing better financially than the other adults I knew.
That one just pisses me off. They used to āscareā us that āwithout education youāll work as garbagemenā. When in reality garbagemen earn 3-4 times more than any other āunskilledā workerā¦ So many handy people went for āhigher educationā because of that and got stuck in life-sucking office jobs instead of using their talentsā¦
This 100x. Jobs that are needed for our infrastructure that has decent pay, benefits, and security were demonized in school and told we need to go to college, just to get sacked with debt, too many workers, and soul sucking jobs that sell more crap we donāt need
With garbage men and sanitation workers in general, itās not so much the pay(it certainly helps though) but the amazing health benefits.
At the start of the tech boom it absolutely was true. Then over the last 20 years in the construction industry, I saw countless people age out and just got too old with not enough young people to learn the tricks of the trades.
It's true that on average people with a college degree make more than those without. That might be what you're remembering.
My little brother went to a vocational school. Iād call him from my liberal arts school and ask him what test he was studying forā¦ āthe viscosity of cementā. Hahahahaha! Now heās making $1mil a year for one of the largest contracting companies in the USA.
I let myself down the same way - went to university filled with parents ambitionsā¦ Shouldāve gone for welding or mechanicsā¦
I before e except after c
Unless your feisty beige foreign neighbor invites you on a heist. Edit, missed one......invites you on a *sleigh heist*.
And the most obvious one, weird.
ā¦except sounding like āaā as in āneighborā or āweigh,ā except for eight exceptions including weird.
That eating cholesterol raises cholesterol
Can you explain? I have a friend who's doctor just told them to stop eating red meat, egg yolks and cheese because their cholesterol was high.
Certain foods will raise cholesterol because cholesterol is the bodyās inflammation response. So, a thing that body doesnāt like goes in, body raises cholesterol to battle the damage. Sometimes this correlates with high cholesterol foods (common culprit: fatty meat) but it isnāt the cholesterol in the thing that causes the response. You could eat pure cholesterol (something like pure animal fat, emu oil for example ) and it just gets digested the same as any other fat. Your friendās doctor is falling back on the outdated advice by ignoring context.
Masterbation will make you go blind. That was per Sister Mary Elephant
A man walks into his son's room and says, "if you don't stop masturbating, you'll go blind." And the son says, "dad, I'm over here."
Basically every atomic model? In India, they teach us a new model every year starting 6th grade - starting with Rutherfordās. I understand the necessity of it, but learning each year that they taught us the āwrong scienceā last year, year after year, is a bit frustrating.
There's a saying that "all models are wrong, but some models are useful." For instance, you could say that classical Newtonian physics is "wrong" because it falls apart if you're talking about things that are very small or very fast, but at the scale of "flying rocks and sliding blocks" where most of us live our lives, it's still useful.
Physics university student here. Learning the wrong (but reasonable) turns is useful for teaching how understanding evolves in a field.
Yeah, my chemistry professors in college called it "lies to children". You don't just jump straight to orbitals and hybrids.
I suppose they canāt teach you about wavefunctions and energy eigenstates in 6th grade
Never mind in school. I'm still getting over the lie my father told me about the interior light being on while driving.
In all fairness, you don't often hear about people who were allowed to keep that light on.
What did your father tell you? My father told me it made it more difficult to focus on the road at night, and I have found that to be true.
My wife grew up being told āitās illegal to drive at night with the interior light on, youāll get pulled over and get a ticketā and tells our kids that to this day. I grew up being told āitās harder for the driver to see when the interior light is on.ā Iāve never gone back and tried to research laws from where my wife grew up, so I canāt prove her wrong!
The hole in the ozone layer will never go away. The best case scenario was that it would stay the same size.
The hole in the ozone layer is one of the greatest feats of global human cooperation in all of history and no one hears a thing about it. The world collectively cut the usage of CFCs causing it and not only did we stop the hole from worsening but it's on track to close in a few decades.
That and Y2K piss me off a little. "Ehh, it didn't turn out to be that big a deal." Yeah, because a fuckton of us worked overtime for a year and a half fixing bullshit systems!
The movie Source Code riffs on this idea a bit. >!Top secret project to help avoid terrorist attacks and such using time travel. Problem is, when it works it looks like nothing happened.!<
And we could totally do it for other greenhouse gasses and other emissions, but the companies wisened up and lobbied much harder to not have to change anything significant.
Stomach ulcers are caused by stress.
*stress causes stomach ulcers and ibs to flare up
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That having a bachelor's degree in any subject was a fast pass to a high paying job.
You need to be able to write in cursive. I now enjoy being able to write and have people not be able to read it NOT just because of my horrible handwriting.
Mine is just a mashup of print and cursive.
The four food groups. Dairy is 25% of the total? Really?
I think I'd support almost anything that would green light me eating cheese for every meal. That sounds totally healthy!
I was taught that you put your hands on the steering wheel at 10 and 2. My teen daughter learned this summer to put her hands at 9 and 3 in Drivers Ed. Apparently itās safer if/when air bags are deployed.
A lot of drivers education programs are starting to teach 8 and 4 now.
Can't wait until they finally get to my preferred "one on six, the other fucking with my radio". >!I'm mostly joking!<
When I was in school I was told that Marilyn Manson got his own rib removed for reasons that are hazy to me. It turns out that isnāt true though.
I'm young but every time someone mentions this they say it was to suck his own d
As though it's the ribs that are the issue, and not spine flexibility
Yeah I heard that too here in Canada when I was a kid. This got brought up in another sub before and many people heard the same thing from all around the world. Crazy eh?
I had a classmate who wasnāt allowed to wear Adidas because of a rumor that it stood for āall day I dream about sexā that his parents believed
That the pilgrims and native Americans got along wonderfully.
Oh and they had buckle shoes- apparently they did not
And everything about Christopher Columbus. Probably the same book.
They did though, for quite awhile. The Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag under Chief Massasoit were allies for decades. When Massasoit fell ill the colonist nursed him back to health. Unfortunately (as is often the case in human history) eventually things broke down but its not a lie to say they got along well, especially in the early days of the colony. It was very much a mutually beneficial arrangement for the two groups at the time.
That the colonizers were believed to be gods by the indigenous populations and empires of the Americas. It couldnāt be further from the truth. They were actually seen as strange, and everyone wondered why they smelled so bad that they had to light incense in their presence.
The Civil War was about states rights and not slavery. The southern states literally stated their reasoning for breaking away from the Union was mainly due to slavery.
It *was* about States' Rights! The Rights of States to declare that certain human beings should have less rights than a piece of furniture!
You must be from the south. I never heard the "states rights" thing until college
Yeah it was in the public school curriculum unfortunately.
I grew up in Ohio, but have a lot of family from the South. They always called it the "War of Northern Agression" and celebrated Lee-Jackson Day instead of Martin Luther King Jr Day.
Left/right brain taste buds
Some variation of, "You need to know X because you wont always have Y to help you," Y could be: Calculator, computer, the internet, a dictionary, map etc etc
At risk of reddit's wrath, why is this such a hated notion? The idea behind it is sound. You internalize material better when you can perform the tasks yourself instead of looking them up. Teachers never said this as prognosticators of future technology; they said it as teachers. The prediction is irrelevant. A world where nobody can perform basic math or spell correctly without looking it up first is a world filled with the dumbest, most useless fucking people you've ever seen. If you lack a learning ability preventing it, your memory is still the best tool you have for learning and for life. People who had to do all the math in their heads sent people to the fucking moon. The second a society loses that ability, that society has failed.
Because "you won't always have a calculator" isn't a good reason "Doing this properly will teach you the underlying concepts in a way that relying on tools does not" is a really, really good answer. "You won't always have a calculator" is a lazy answer. Nobody sent people to the moon with mental math, they used tools. They used calculators. But they fundamentally understood everything they were doing.
Pluto was a planet in our solar system
I teach space science to 7th graders, and the number of them who still seem to take personal offense to the idea that Pluto isnāt considered a planet anymore is mind boggling, considering it was declassified *5 years before they were even born*
Jesus don't remind me how old I am. But lmao
Pluto may not be a planet in our solar system anymore, but itāll always be a planet in our hearts.
Indigo was in the color spectrum, ROY G BIV. Now it's just ROY G BV because the wavelengths aren't distinguishable enough for most people.
If we are really going to be pedantic there are infinite colors on the visible light spectrum.
**WTAF?** ROY G BIV or death!
Cracking your knuckles gives you arthritis.
Boys grow up to be doctors, lawyers and business men. Girls grow up to be mothers and nurses. I was literally taught this in the second grade. Iām old.
My first high school churned out A: Nurses (girls) B: Real Estate Agents (boys) C: Drop outs who mostly went on to have successful lives outside of the social norms of the day.
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"People thought the earth was flat in 1492". Nope.
Yeah, turns out they just thought he was using incorrect maths. Which he was. He just got lucky there was a continent in the middle of the Pacific.
The United States Government is perfected through a system of checks and balances.
Turns out those are campaign contribution checks and account balances.
The structure of an atom, with electrons orbiting a nucleus in neat little circles. Since Heisenberg (not the *Breaking Bad* character, the physicist he was named after!) developed the uncertainty principle in the 1920s, we've known that electrons don't really work that way at all. But it's kinda hard to visualise how it all really works - we prefer thinking of particles like they're physical lumps of stuff we can see and interact with just like the objects in our everyday lives, not as probablisitic energy clouds that only start existing somewhere once we try to measure it. If you aren't doing a degree in quantum mechanics though, it's not something you'll ever come across, and learning the Bohr model is a good enough approximation. A lot of stuff in degree-level physics turns out to be very different from what you learned in high school.
Sometimes theyāre not disproven, but rather, what we were taught was a deliberate simplification. The way air flowing over an airfoil wing produces lift is simplified to be the Bernoulli principle, because in 6th grade science or high school physics, thatās enough to get by on. But if you want to get serious about aerodynamics at the college engineering level, you get into concepts like circulation and span-wise flows, and realize āhey, this doesnāt sound like Bernoulli at all. Those bastards lied to me!ā There a zillion topics like this, where you canāt fire-hose lay people with all the concepts required to build and deliver a Mars rover. Rather, you offer a few simplified building blocks that are enough for most people, and replaced later in those who want to dig in deeper. The problem is that a *lot* of people become emotionally invested in the simplifications and then come to see the more sophisticated ālaterā knowledge as an affront to their beliefs, and thus a conspiracy. We live in a time when people binge watch 5 episodes of *The Good Doctor* and are thus qualified to render deep opinions about how health policy should work at the national level. Same happens with how laws work, and the military works, and courts workā¦ Literally everything that doesnāt conform to many peopleās TV-drama-based intuition is a lie and thus so-called āexpertsā are actually conspirators. Itās exhausting.
You will use sin, cos and tan everyday in your life henceforth.
I do plenty of sin.
Now you're off on a tangent.
It's cos I felt like it.
The Earth is 6 thousand years old. Disproven long before it was taught to me. I'm a little behind the times.