Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
There are some things you get taught in schools. Certain facts you learn from such a young
age that they can stay with you for the rest of your life, even though, actually, they're
overly simplistic or just not true. Other facts are found to be false years after we've
learned them, but we kind of... Miss the news. So here are our top five facts that aren't
actually true.
5. The Great Wall of China...
There's this old myth that the Great Wall of China is the only manmade object visible
from space. No, no it's not. In fact not only is it not the only object visible from space,
as this timelapse from the ISS shows in equisite detail, you can't EVEN see the wall from space.
Not unless there's a picture of it in your hand. It's not so much that it's not big enough
to see, you can see rivers and the like in the right light, it's that it's camoflaged.
The wall was built out of rock. Rock hewn from the local ground. So, for the most part,
it's the same colour as the surrounding countryside. This old myth comes from long, long before
space travel actually existed. And now it does, we know that the great wall of China
legend is a complete pile of Kung Po.
4. Different parts of the tongue taste different things.
Nothing tastes as bitter as being wrong, and there's no taste as sweet as victory. Apart
from possibly *** in the morning. Ah, no, that's smell. Right. But yes, it seems, there's
no 'zones' of the tongue for sweet, salty, bitter, sour, or the only recently accepted
and savoury taste of Umami. Sweet is supposed to be at the tip of the tongue, but drop some
lemon jiuce there, and you'll quickly find out that it's just not true. It turns out
that for most people, one section of the tongue is very much like another, possibly more or
less sensitive to taste, but it can still pick up all five.
3. Humans have five senses
And on the topic of the sweet taste of victory and the victorious smell of ***, how many
senses do you have? Loads, that's the answer. Loads. Close your eyes, and put your finger
on your nose. Hit it first time? Yeah, that's a sense. It must be, right? Because you have
a feeling for where to put that finger. Steady now. It's called proprioception, and it's
a sense of relative space and distance. Oh yeah, and pain, pain is a sense too. Ooh,
but that's touch, you say. No it's not. If you have a hangover nothing's touching your
brain. Apart from a hammer. Hard. Repeatedly. Better just go back to bed.
2. People once thought the world was flat. No, no they didn't. Anyone who did was an
idiot. Anyone who does wants attention. We may not have known much about the world in
ancient times but the first sailors vanishing over the horizon led philosophical types to
conclude that the world must be sort of a ball shape. The Greeks wrote about it extensively,
and had pretty much worked out that, eventually, you'd more or less get to where you started
if you carried on going. There were even some pretty educated guesses as to how big the
whole thing was, even though most of the scenery between what you could see in front of you
and the back of your head was unknown. No, unfortunately this myth came about during
the late reneissance, where scholars looking back at our uncivilised medeival ancestors
decided that they couldn't possibly have known what the world looked like, and the myth snowballed.
1. Mount Everest is the tallest mountain in the world
Oh yes. This is a big one. Literally. Everest isn't the biggest mountain in the world. Well,
it sort of is. And sort of isn't. Let us explain. Mountains are measured to their peak from
sea level. Makes sense, right? And puts Everest top of the pile at 8,848 meters or so, though
it's growing by an astonishing half centimetre odd every year as the Himalayas gets crunched
upwards. But if you go from the base of the mountain
up, it's a whole different story. Enter Mauna Kea in Hawaii, which, as a volacano rising
directly out of the sea bed, is 10,200 metres, so Everest wins primarily on a technicality.
Of course, it's somewhat easier to get to the tippedy top of Mauna Kea. But so far,
no one's managed to scale the whole thing without Oxygen. Obviously.
So there you have it, five things we thought we knew, and we were wrong. Of course there's
loads more examples, let us know yours in the comments and we'll pick out some of the
best in next week's Tuesday show. Ciao!