There are so many announcements and discoveries and studies and new technology showing up every single day that it can be hard to keep up with it all. If you want to make sure you’re still in the know it can take some serious effort.

So, you might want to check this list and then reconsider your belief in these things that have definitely been debunked.

Nevermind what you saw on Seinfeld.

That if you shave it’ll grow back longer and thicker.

As a licensed Waxing Specialist this misconception drives me nuts because I am literally educated on this s*%t and people still argue with me.

Plucking and waxing does have an effect on the hair growth pattern because you’re removing the whole root of the hair.

But shaving is just surface level and does nothing but make the regrowth sharper.

Find a ditch instead.

Hiding under a highway overpass is actually not a good way to survive a tornado.

It has been scientifically proven that the wind gets concentrated and the speeds increase underneath the overpass.

If you aren’t shielded by a bridge girder or something similar you’ll just get swept away and mulched.

Your best bet for survival if you cannot escape the tornado is to find the nearest deep ditch or hole.

Not in the textbook.

That blood is blue until it comes into contact with air.

Wow thanks, this is the first one I read that I didn’t know. My old science teacher was amazing and she taught us it was blue, so I really doubted you until I looked it up.

In her defense, she was a physics/maths fanatic and openly admitted biology just wasn’t her thing. But still, I presume it must have been in our textbook. Madness!

Ted Lasso was wrong.

Goldfish have a three second memory.

They don’t and, supposedly, you can even train them to do tricks.

It’s called your liver.

Most things that tout “detoxifying” properties.

The body naturally detoxifies the blood. That is the whole point of the liver and kidneys, no? Well, waste as well as toxins.

As simple as that.

Cracking knuckles = arthritis

some scientist guy spent 60 years doing that experiment. It’s actually just gas between your joints. I keep having to explain this to all my family who keeps telling me to stop cracking them.

I will never stop.

Easy to disprove.

Lightning never strikes in one place twice.

The Empire State Building gets hit about a few dozen times per year.

No dumb frog.

A frog thrown in a pot of boiling water will jump out immediately. If a frog is put in a pot of cool water and that water is slowly warmed, the frog won’t notice and boil to death.

This is indeed false.

Well…

We only use 10% of our brain.

And we only ever use 33% of a traffic light. Imagine the power if we used 100%!

We definitely need to update that.

Most dietary information that is widely accepted by the public was from studies that have been proven wrong since the 70s.

It was really kind of a joke.

“Physics says bees shouldn’t be able to fly.” It was said as a joke (much like Schrödinger‘s cat), but people took it as fact.

I thought that was specific to bumblebees. I heard that their wings aren’t big enough according to the laws of aerodynamics or something. Then when they took into account the speed of the wings it made sense.

But the original idea I heard about was that the bumbles fly because nobody told them that they couldn’t. I kind of like that, even if it’s not true. The power of positive thinking!

Toss away.

That rice will make the birds who eat it explode. Birds eat rice all the time! It’s actually good for them, especially brown rice.

I believe this myth was made up so people would stop throwing rice at weddings, but harming the birds wasn’t an actual risk. It was getting rice grains stuck in your ear that was.

Only if you’re dead.

That you can “alkalize” your body to prevent or cure disease.

Technically you can raise your blood pH to the point where you don’t get disease, but only in the sense that dead people don’t get disease.

Either way, you’ll never know.

Anything along the lines of “the average person eats eight spiders in their sleep during the course of their life” yadda yadda yadda

Wait, what?

Despite popular belief, urine is not sterile.

As a corollary: do not pee on jellyfish stings.

Unless you are both consenting adults and into that.

Way too many people still believing this stuff, right?

Although I do feel as if it can happen to the best of us.