The internet did cut a lot of arguments short, but there are still quite a few “truths” we wold fiercely defend, without ever knowing better. Here are a couple.

** The Great wall of China is not the only man-made structure visible from out of space. In fact, astronauts report they can’t even see it from orbit. The only man-made objects visible from orbit are city lights; visible only because of their quantity and density.

** Black holes are not necessarily “cosmic vacuum cleaners”. They, most often, have a mass smaller than the object (star) that created them. According to the Mass-energy equivalence, and the fact that the forming of a black hole is an explosive process, the gravitational pull of a black hole is generally quite smaller that that of the star it was made from.

** Seasons are not caused by Earth being at different distances from the sun, at different times of the year. In fact, it is farthest from the sun when it’s summer in the Northern hemisphere. It’s the incline that makes all the difference. The Earth tilts on it’s axis by 23.4 degrees, and when an area of the Earth’s surface is perpendicular to the sun, it receives the largest amount of radiation, making for a hot summer.

** Humans have more than five senses. Although definitions vary, the actual number ranges from 9 to more than 20. In addition to sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing, which were the senses identified by Aristotle, humans can sense balance and acceleration (equilibrioception), pain (nociception), body and limb position (proprioception or kinesthetic sense), and relative temperature (thermoception). Other senses sometimes identified are the sense of time, itching, pressure, hunger, thirst, fullness of the stomach, need to urinate, need to defecate, and blood carbon dioxide levels .

** A duck’s quack does make an echo. It’s just difficult for humans to hear it in some circumstances.

** Lemmings do not engage in mass suicides. Only humans do, or did. It was actually Disney that perpetuated this old myth in it’s film “White wilderness”, where lemmings were pushed of a studio cliff, by photographers.

** It’s not the color Red that upsets the bull so much. Cattle are dichromats, meaning they only see two shades, so red does not stand out to them as a very bright color. It is, in fact of a darker shade. The thing that does, however irritate the big bull is the waving of the fabric.

** Hair and fingernails do not continue to grow after a person dies. Rather, the skin dries and shrinks away from the bases of hairs and nails, giving the appearance of growth.

** Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball.

** Thomas Edison did not invent the light bulb. He did, however, develop the first practical light bulb in 1880 (employing a carbonized bamboo filament), shortly prior to Joseph Swan, who invented an even more efficient bulb in 1881 (which used a cellulose filament).

** Warts on human skin are caused by viruses that are unique to humans (human papillomavirus). Humans cannot catch warts from toads or other animals; the bumps on a toad are not warts.

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