- Reading in poor light ruins your eyesight: true or false?
Not that this imprecation ever keeps budding young bookworms from discovering if the hero prevails and the smugglers get their desserts, or whatever. Perhaps, if your vision has dimmed, you occasionally curse your youthful self for taking such a cavalier and, well, short-sighted attitude. If so then you can relax a...
Posted Mon 01 Jun 2009.
- Hair grows back thicker after shaving: true or false?
This is may seem a purely female concern, but who knows how many spotty teenage boys have assiduously plied the razor in the hope of transforming downy fluff into a manly beard? As it happens the definitive study on this point was conducted on men’s leg hair but the results are...
Posted Mon 01 Jun 2009.
- Placebos do nothing: true or false?
This depends on what you mean by nothing. When you think of a placebo, you probably think of a sugar pill or an injection of water: something that a doctor might prescribe when they don’t want to prescribe anything. The scope for such pure placebos is virtually nil in the modern...
Posted Mon 01 Jun 2009.
- Psychologists know what you’re thinking: true or false?
Do you find yourself strangely silent when meeting a dentist or psychologist in a social setting? Dentists must be shielded from your teeth, while psychologists must be shielded from inadvertent slips of the tongue which might reveal your deepest fears and desires. But don’t worry: psychologists can’t read your thoughts.This misconception...
Posted Mon 01 Jun 2009.
- Carrots help you see in the dark: true or false?
Unlike some of the more tenuous claims parents make in the ongoing battle to get their kids eating vegetables, this one is quite true. The key is vitamin A, or retinol. We need retinol: animals can’t synthesise it themselves so rely on getting it in food. The typical omnivorous human gets...
Posted Mon 01 Jun 2009.
- Glass is really a liquid: true or false?
The evidence being that very old window panes are thicker at the bottom because they’ve flowed down over the centuries. Let’s dispatch this piece of misinformation for a start. Yes, many old windows are thicker at the bottom, but they were thicker at the bottom when they were installed. Even so,...
Posted Mon 01 Jun 2009.
- Oxygen is good for you: true or false?
Oxygen is necessary, that much is not controversial. But just because oxygen is necessary doesn’t mean that more is better. Sure, you’d last only seconds without oxygen, but in many ways oxygen is the enemy. We’re happy to gulp it down day after day, but as soon as a fire breaks...
Posted Mon 01 Jun 2009.
- Water always drains clockwise: true or false?
Or anticlockwise, in the northern hemisphere. And precisely on the equator it’s supposed to run straight down the plughole with no swirling at all.It’s a wonder this myth persists when each of us daily has several opportunities to test it out (if you don’t, that may be why people have been...
Posted Mon 01 Jun 2009.
- Fingernails keep growing after death: true or false?
And not just fingernails but hair, too, according to common belief, proving that not even the grimmest areas of life are immune to trivia. Few of us could ever personally verify this titbit. It isn’t, after all, an experiment you can conduct on your own, and few would have the presence...
Posted Mon 01 Jun 2009.
- No two snowflakes are alike: true or false?
This is a bold statement to be coming from scientists, usually world-champion hedgers. Snow is not a well understood phenomenon but, in a funny way, it is our ignorance — or rather the reason for our ignorance — which makes this claim such a good bet.It may seem incredible, pondering in...
Posted Mon 01 Jun 2009.
