A malleable fact isn't a fact, it's an opinion.
So it feels like much of early education has been a big bag of opinions heeped onto generations prior.
No wonder those standardized tests were such a mess.
On the flip side of that thought, life, and science evolve, so facts do change.
Once you're out in the real world, so much has to be relearned and disproven.
Who can keep up?
It feels like we should be paid as participants in the school of life.
So let's do some relearning.
Redditor yepvaishz wanted to hear about the times we've learned some new things about some old things, so they asked:
"What was a fact taught to you in school that ended up being disproven during your lifetime?"
The amount of lies we were fed in school is too high to count.
So let's sift through memory lane and make some corrections.
RECOUNT!
My Work Animation GIF by AndiGiphy"From an educational filmstrip: 'Saturn has four beautiful rings...' The Voyager photos of the thousands of rings had come in like a week before we watched this."
robaato72
Never say Never
"Germany would never reunite. The French would never allow it."
Powerful-Ad9392
"I'm German and I was 11 when it happened. We housed our East German part of the family for a couple of weeks when they came over to visit. My cousin was my age and had never been shopping (just wandering around a mall looking at things) and my uncle begged my dad to take him to a hardware store just to see what stuff was available."
"Just three months before the wall fell, my dad had been over to visit them, just by himself, saying it was too dangerous for us kids (and I imagine it would have been a hassle getting permission for the whole family). It was such a wonderful time. A peaceful revolution without a single gunshot."
"I'll never forget the moment when the people who had fled to the German embassy in Prague got told they were allowed to leave. That collective scream of joy and relief by 4000 people still makes me tear up every time I watch the video. https://youtu.be/Qh9EwNurawE"
best-in-two-galaxies
200 MPH
"Pompeii was buried slowly by falling ash. They pointed out that remnants of people were found, right in the middle of doing things, but didn't realise this contradicted the burying being slow. It's now thought that it was buried very quickly by pyroclastic flows - superheated gas travelling over 200mph."
ablativeyoyo
"It’s also blew my mind to find out the 'bodies' you see at the site were the hollow spaces where a body once was, filled with plaster, and the hardened ash removed. As a kid I never thought about it I just saw shapes of bodies and thought 'that's a body.'"
Zanzoken814
Bye Kraken
"When I was a kid, the Giant Squid had never been captured or photographed, and some people talked about it like it was el chupacabra. My little brother always said he'd be the first person to get footage of one. Sadly, it has since become an ordinary animal that we know exists. RIP the Kraken."
EarthExile
"I’ve seen the preserved corpses at the Smithsonian. It’s pretty fascinating to think no evidence existed until our lifetime."
UnihornWhale
Crack Away
Sonic 2 Punch GIF by Sonic The HedgehogGiphy"Cracking your knuckles causes arthritis."
panda388
"They just wanted us to stop."
Admiral_Minell
I've cracked for years and probably will for life.
My fingers are still slender.
Diet Lies
Season 7 Nbc GIF by The OfficeGiphy"Food pyramid."
OutrageousEvent
"Of all the facts that have since been disproven, this might be the worst. We have a generation of adults who are getting diabetes and fatty liver disease because of what these people said."
calumin
Bad Illustrations
"Your tongue has different areas for tasting different tastes:sweet on the tip, sour on the sides, bitter in the back, etc. I feel like this was some elaborate prank played on my generation. But I remember seeing this in my elementary school biology textbook. I don’t even think it was disproven, like, they just stopped telling this lie. WTF."
"From what I have read, more like a game of telephone.Study results got slightly distorted, and then changed into a graph which didn’t have meaningful numbers, which lead to an illustration, which got re-purposed. That an illustration got put into textbooks for years and years."
danneedsahobby
Exposure
"Blood is blue until exposed to oxygen."
mwjb86SFW
"This one triggers me. I had an old lady teaching my 6th grade science class that sent me to detention for arguing with her when she said the blood in your veins was blue but red in your arteries. To be fair, I argued with her on a lot of things she was wrong about, but this is the only one that resulted in detention."
"That's the only time I can remember my dad, a chemist, actually go to the school to confront a teacher for being wrong. Incidentally, she also counted off on a test because I said sound was one of the senses. She wanted hearing. I said you sense a taste, you sense a sight, you sense a smell, and you sense a touch, so why don't you sense a sound? That argument lasted several days, but she did give me my points back."
pacer_3iii
The Science of It All
"Neurons can never regenerate. This was from my then-one-year-old anatomy and physiology textbook, and my private, Catholic school actually took - and still takes - its science seriously; we never talked about creationism or the divine influence on our natural world, not to mention our solid AP Physics and AP Chemistry scores. It turns out that that the peripheral neuron system actually can regenerate; as of now, it doesn’t seem that the central nervous system has much in the way of that capability."
Brunt-FCA-285
Jokes on Them
muppets computers GIFGiphy"Playing with computers is a waste of time and won’t lead to a career. Said to me by a very old, and bitter teacher. 25 years in IT and counting."
zerbey
Who knew computers would take over the world?
They seemed just like big cumbersome machines at first.
Now they build and destroy lives and careers.
Redditor Churbuddahbread wanted to hear from the people who believe they have lived through meeting other life forms, so they asked:
"People of Reddit who have been abducted by aliens. What’s your story?"
I have no alien stories.
Apparently, they don't want me.
I don't want them either.
NO!
alien GIFGiphy"Not sure if this was a dream or not but I remember being in some kind of craft facing towards one of the walls. I felt a presence behind me and was so scared I couldn’t move at all. Then out of nowhere I suddenly felt completely at ease. To my left out of the corner of my eye, I could see a big being that almost looked like a large tardigrade behind some kind of control panel."
"I turned to see another being. (Can’t really remember what this one looked like) but I remember asking if I could ask some questions. I then received a reply which came from within my own head. 'No' And that’s all I remember."
Churbuddahbread
It wasn't there before
"My brother-in-law says he was abducted. Don't know too much except he was out in the woods walking around. He was gone overnight. He never does that without letting somebody know that at least, he's leaving. He was found the next morning completely stunned. On shock. He could barely talk."
"He never really said what happened. He won't talk about it. He said only, that they performed examinations on him. His right foot now has what I can only describe as a birthmark on his right foot. It wasn't there before. That I know!! It wasn't there!! Now he's got a deep purple mark that covers most of his foot.? Wtf??"
Lazy-Lawfulness3472
In the middle of the night...
"They took me in the middle of the night. I was out feeding the cattle under the moonlight and then a big light came over me. The next thing I knew, I was driving down the road talking to what I later realized was my father. Or... the person whose body I am now in’s father. He made a joke about the time being slow and he had seen an episode of XFiles that mentioned that time reverses when aliens abduct so they can drop you off at the same time as they picked you up."
"Except I think they mixed something up because I am not in the same body I left in. I still remember my whole life before but I am 18 years younger in this body so I don't really mind... But a few years after the incident, I went to see if the farm I once lived on was still there, but it took me a while to get there without suspicion. It's gone. Like it never stood. Maybe it was all just a dream."
Biggmamaaa
The sun is up
"One of my old high school friends believes she was abducted when we were in our teens. She said that one evening she was hanging out in bed, drawing in her sketchbook. A pair of lights like headlights on a car caught her eye out the window, but when she looked properly she could see that the lights were higher up above the road than they should have been, and there was no noise."
"The lights continued getting closer to her apartment building and eventually shone right into her window. She blinked, and the next thing she knew, she was lying down in bed under the covers and the sun was coming up."
CosmicJellyroll
Hybrids
"I was genuinely abducted by aliens. I was driving at night on my own down the M62 motorway in the UK around 3 am for a job I was working. The next thing I know, it's 5 am. 2 hours had gone nowhere. I thought I was going or mad at something and when I got home I went to bed."
"Anyways, when in bed I dreamed about what happened and it came back to me. On the alien craft, they put me in a room and I was lying on the floor... Then they put an injection into my arm which was this red, rusty-like liquid. I think this was to monitor me."
"Every few weeks or so I'll wake up in the morning at 5 am and I know I've been back there, but can never remember it. Sometimes I get a feeling that I've been visited or am about to be visited. It's not fun and nobody believes me, but what they're doing is using our genetic makeup to populate other planets with hybrid beings."
iLikeGingerGirlslol
It's always a joke until someone gets abducted by aliens.
Quick as That...
Kate Mckinnon Snl GIF by Saturday Night LiveGiphy"It went from daylight to dark in a blink, my mom walked by where I should have been if I was asleep, but I wasn't there apparently, and I'll never forget that. Maybe it was aliens, never figured it out. When I was 7 or 8, during the summer, mid-day around noon. I'm home sitting by the door, looking into the lagoon waiting for my mom to come home. I blink and it's now nighttime. Quick as that."
"No fatigue, no sleep, just a blink. Hours have gone by and I'm sitting in the same spot, wide awake, except it's dark out. Just a blink. My mom is in the kitchen making food and playing music. When I go in, she asks where I was. I told her, sitting in front of the door waiting for her to come home."
"She didn't believe me and chalked it up to being a kid's joke, she's been home for hours now and assumed I was at my friend's house a couple of houses over. After that, I had a tiny lump on my right shin under my skin. I could roll it around a little with my fingers. It dissolved after about 2 months. If a BB pellet is 4.6 mm, it was probably like 1.3mm."
BYNCody
Therapy
"I actually had a therapist who treated people for their trauma from alien abductions. I’m not kidding and I’m not suggesting I really believed they were abducted. I’m not sure she even did but she seemed to suggest to me that if they felt traumatized by something that happened to them, she would help them."
Turbulent_End_2211
4
"You know I have been saying this since I was about 4. Somebody took me. I've always pointed to a spot on my calf that I've always thought it was a scar from a foreign insertion. But I have zero recollection of anything. And at 4 I was too young to make it up or even know the word alien. But my mom would always say the same thing no matter what, it's a growing pain. We could have been dying and that was her come back."
AssumptionAdvanced58
A Light Sleeper
"Not my story, but my Father in law swears he was abducted on a camping trip in the Northern Appalachians with about 4 other people. They hiked up near a lake and set up a campsite, and set up camp. He says they all remember swimming, then eating dinner but no one remembers cleaning up camp or going into their tents."
"They woke up about 10 yards away from their original site, in the exact formation that they had set up the camp, but all of the little stuff was in the same spot and there was no fire in the middle of the original area but not in the new one. They pulled out a measuring tape my FIL had in his backpack from work and measured the distance between the stakes of the tent poles and it was the EXACT distance between all of the tent poles from where they originally were and the new area."
"And before anyone says anything, my FIL is a super light sleeper( according to my MIL) and doesn't drink or do drugs, has no history or symptoms of mental illness, and was the first one awake. He still refuses to go hiking on that trail to this day, it's an easy hike so he isn't trying to be lazy and get out of it."
preggomuhegggggo
Fascinations
"I believe I have been abducted multiple times. Probably about once every two or three years since I was eight. I have been examined, but nothing invasive was ever done and the extraterrestrials seemed genuinely curious about humans. More often it is just an interview via telepathy about how I am feeling and how things are going."
"The last abduction was about six months ago. I remember waking up, seeing figures through my bedroom window make their way into my home, never waking my girlfriend or dogs, and leading me out to their craft. One even seemed fascinated with one of my dogs, but I sort of thought how angry and hurt I would be if anything happened to that dog and he backed away."
Termi89
Still Shaken
James Cameron Aliens GIF by 20th Century Fox Home EntertainmentGiphy"Not my story, it's my dad's, he gets a little shaky and doesn't like talking about it when it's brought up. When he was about 15 he and his friend did the childhood tradition of camping in the backyard. Everything seemed pretty much normal and they went to bed at around midnight. Shortly after falling asleep, they both woke up in a state of extreme disorientation and mental fog 2.5 miles away from his house in a empty grass field."
"When he checked his watch it was 4 AM with no recollection of what happened those 4 hours. There was no alcohol or drugs involved. He never let me camp in our backyard growing up so I have a slight distaste for our extraterrestrial neighbors."
UrbanDowntown
This is why alien movies still freak me out.
I can't do them, just in case.
Do you have any stories? Let us know in the comments below.
Redditor r3tr0gam3r83 wanted to hear about which realizations in life have left people SHOOK, so they asked:
"What is something that blew your mind once you realized it?"
Avocados are not vegetables.
They're fruits, berries to be exact.
Like what?!?!
Colleagues
GIF by Bud LightGiphy"Sometimes it is more important to like your colleagues than the actual job."
"I had shi**y jobs with the most amazing colleagues and had shi**y colleagues and the most amazing job. I'd pick the first every time."
chr989
Star Trekking
"That you could legitimately travel at warp speed through the center of galaxies and never run any real risk of hitting a star. That’s how spread out space really is."
justanotherguyhere16
"Also, galaxies, stars, and even the Universe is constantly moving. I think time travel has been invented, but they can’t figure out the 'space' part of it.
"Yes, they can travel back in time, but relatively speaking, they can’t figure out how to navigate to the part of the planet they want to reach. So when they travel back in time, it’s relative to where they currently are, and end up not moving through space, thus ending up in the middle of an empty vacuum."
theknights-whosay-Ni
Jaws is Old
"That sharks predated the rings of Saturn."
BeardedDominant
"Sharks also developed the immune system that ended up in both dinosaurs/birds and mammals."
csiz
"We don’t know that. We can’t say for certain that the rings are only 100 million years old. It’s still debated."
The_Kek_5000
"I'm pretty sure that sharks are older than trees."
Cayderent
From the Trees
"One day I sat on a tram, passing a river. There was a duck in a tree. I realized I'd never seen ducks in trees. No one else seemed to notice, but I was puzzled. Now whenever I come across something that seems intuitive but I have never considered I call it a duck in a tree."
Ol_Pasta
"This realization happened to me this past year. We apparently have a family of wood ducks in one of the big trees in our yard. Our neighbor said she has seen a duck walking around on a branch. I made it 37 years without knowing some ducks can roost in trees. My wife caught a video of the mama leading like eight ducks into the field next to our house. We aren't even near water."
jwbourne
Artistic Timeline
Confused Eminem GIFGiphy"Pablo Picasso and Eminem were both alive at the same time."
leebon427
"I’d bet a lot of people think Picasso is a Renaissance artist."
editormatt
I admit it. I'm one of those people. Pablo and Marshall, in one lifetime.
New facts are fun.
The New World
Design Loop GIF by xponentialdesignGiphy"They were colonizing the Wild West at the same time as they were building skyscrapers in Manhattan. I always think of them taking place eighty to a hundred years apart. It's wild."
Emilayday
Oh the Power
"Nuclear power plants are just steam power plants that use nuclear reactions to heat the water. There's no fancy magic extracting energy directly from nuclear material. They just boil water and spin a turbine."
RenaKunisaki
"Most electrical generation is spinning a turbine. Photovoltaic solar power is pretty much the only exception, and it's not the only form of solar power. There's solar thermal power, which uses mirrors or lenses to concentrate the heat of the sun to make steam and turn a turbine."
Brawndo91
The Empire
"The Roman Empire fully fell less than 50 years before the discovery of the new world."
South-by-north
"The Romans also had copper wire, magnets, and battery acid. They could have invented electricity hundreds of years before it was actually discovered. But they didn't. The wire was used for jewelry, the magnets as lodestones, and the battery acid was used to clean the rust off of swords."
Kahzgul
"RIP Byzantine Empire. 1453 never forget."
crossbowman44
The Witness
"Owl‘s silent flight. I mean I always knew that but a while ago was the first time I actually witnessed it. Owl came flying towards me and landed only a few feet away and you couldn‘t hear anything. Crazy."
Zealousideal-You-324
"I saw a barn owl swoop down and catch a mouse while hiking at night, and the whole thing happened in complete silence. It gave me a deep sense of unease because it was literally like someone hit the mute button on life."
VulcanVisions
Bad Kermit
Kermit The Frog Meme GIF by IdentityGiphy"Poison dart frogs aren't poisonous in captivity."
"I own 5 of them and anytime I tell someone I own some I always get 'Do you ever lick them' or 'Can you go kill someone with them.' But yeah they get their poison from what they eat, and all I give them is fruit flies."
JMfury
Poison frogs?
That sounds like something Rose would have a story about on 'The Golden Girls.'
But thanks to an unnamedRedditor, some of those were revealed when they asked strangers online:
"What are some really creepy facts you know ?"
Scientific facts like these can be downright terrifying.
The Sound Of Prey
"Dogs like squeezing toys because it sound like a dying animal."
– Nain6969
"My dog loves squeeze toys except the chirping bird toy we got for our cats. If he hears it he picks it up very gently and brings it to us and then whines and is distressed by it."
– CopperTucker
Ominous Mass
"There is a black hole called Phoenix a, and it is estimated to be 100 billion times the mass of our Sun, comparable to the mass of an entire galaxy. Its event horizon is 590 billion kilometers wide, or more than 100 times the distance from the Sun to Pluto, or about 1/16 of a lightyear wide."
"To get a visualization of how big that is on a human scale, lets shrink our solar system by 1 trillion times."
"The Sun would be 1 millimeter wide, and Pluto would be a little more than 5 meters away, and that black hole would be 590 meters wide. For reference, Alpha Centauri would be about 40 kilometers away at that scale."
– Youpunyhumans
Easy Passage
"Take away the stomach acid and an octopus could go into your mouth and crawl out your a**hole."
– Resident-Clue1290
Creepy Crawlies
"Spiders, one of the most evolutionary advanced species on the planet. We keept killing them, they began to get better at hiding. They can also convince us we have killed them when we haven't. Rain doesn't destroy their webs, not even a pressured hose does anymore."
"Also forgot to mention, they can do nothing, sleep all day and wake up to find food in their webs. They do not need to hunt or attack like almost every animal."
– Unlucky_Ducky23
Some of the sinister forces around us are the work of humans.
Murderers In Our Midst
"As many as 50 serial killers are active in the US and on the loose."
– Individual_Bit_8528
"Wayyy more than 50 if you include organized crime affiliated killers. Probably a lot more than 50 lone weirdos killing strangers too, but definitely hundreds or more if you include the former demographic."
– fluffedpillows
Corruption
"A guy disappeared in my country. Everyone knew he died. Everyone knew who did it. But the guys were policemen. So the investigation was so ruined it became ridiculous."
"There are people on this planet who can interven in the investigations made against them, decide to block them and if you do something about it, no one will investigate when you will mysteriously vanish."
"Can't fathom to be so powerful but yet use this power to be so heartless."
– Least-Designer7976
A Patient's Risk
"In 45 states, doctors and medical students are legally allowed to practice pelvic exams on patients who are under anesthesia without being granted explicit consent to do so."
– TrailerParkPrepper
Feasting On Flesh
"The first known human cannibal was a Neanderthal whose victims' 100,000-year-old bones were discovered in Moula-Guercy, a cave in France."
"There have been sites where the act has occurred involving the cannibalism of children leading some to speculate the act was not just done for food, but that it was done as a warning to rivals."
"Some anthropologists suggest that cannibalism was common in human societies as early as the Paleolithic."
"To this day only a few countries have laws which explicitly criminalize the practice of cannibalism, and the act can still be found in isolated regions of five different Countries."
– JustSomeApparition
Death itself is a mystery.
Ill-Fated Flight
"The crew aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia was still alive for several minutes during the fatal and futile reentry attempt."
"The first signs of trouble were observed at 8:53:46. More and more started to go wrong but Mission Control was able to maintain communication through 8:59:32. Sometime after that, the shuttle entered a flat spin while traveling approximately Mach 15, which is enough to cause disorientation and very painful injury, but most likely not unconsciousness or death. Review of recovered data recording shows that Commander Husband and Pilot McCool were still attempting to restore systems and recover control past 9:00:05. The first lethal event was depressurization, which occurred between 9:00:35 and 9:00:59."
"All that means that the crew was very much alive and very much fighting to maintain/regain control for more than 7 minutes despite knowing that realistically their chances of success were pretty much zero."
– HoopOnPoop
After The Chopping
"Supposedly you're still aware for a few seconds after being decapitated."
– Broski225
"There was that one scientist or whatever who got beheaded in France. He said he would attempt to blink as many times as possible after his head was lopped off, for science, and his head did. I'm paraphrasing since I don't remember anything about the story but whatever. lol"
– Adkit
Now you know.
Some of the scariest things in life are our real living nightmares, and once you know about them, you can't unlearn them.
Reading through some of these examples, it's very clear that our world is a mysterious and creepy place to live in.
Sleep tight, and don't let the bedbugs bite.
