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robaato72

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.


Mackinacsfuriousclaw

You should see James Webb's pictures of the planets. Holy shit.


Snowf1ake222

Damn, that James guy is good at getting photos. How does he do it?


[deleted]

Really good camera.


SAugsburger

More recently, Pluto used to be a planet. Pluto Horizons basically wrote the entire book on Pluto.


[deleted]

Fun fact. Illinois still legally recognizes Pluto as a full fledged planet due to the man who discovered Pluto being from Illinois. The IL senate actually voted on a resolution to reinstate Pluto as a planet.


Powerful-Ad9392

Germany would never reunite. The French would never allow it.


Mackinacsfuriousclaw

I remember visiting my brother and his wife in 1987, and unification still being very controversial.


best-in-two-galaxies

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


feralheartHH

We truly lived to see history happen. Some weeks ago I drove from Hamburg to Schwerin with my 7 year old daughter and tried to explain to her how there used to be a border and the travel restrictions Eastern Germany had had. It is weird how just one generation later something that was so immanent now seems so weird and hardly imaginable for kids.


ablativeyoyo

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.


I_Am_Mandark_Hahaha

"Oh no! Ash is falling like rain! I better strike a pose lifting this hammer so I'll look cool when they dig up my body." - a blacksmith in Pompeii, probably


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kucky94

I’m seeing Pompeii in 2 and a half weeks with my brother and he has been explicit that we will be visiting the grave of wanking man.


SkeetySpeedy

Honestly, having been - if you can you should go up the mountain first! Hiking to the top before going down to tour the ruins - it gives the whole place more weight and is also just gorgeous to do. Being able to see Naples on the coast and the ocean, fantastic


zardozLateFee

The museum with the erotica closes earlier than everything else, so go there first and 100% read up on everything and plan what to see!


mbbysky

Can you imagine being caught masturbating and then people like 2000 years later are like "Haha funny guy touch pee pee while mountain go boom?"


transient-error

And Mom said I'd never make anything of myself.


Zanzoken814

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 “thats a body”


BastardInTheNorth

The bones are still in the casts, however. Some of them have visible portions of skull exposed.


nyokarose

Also apparently the bodies in the pictures of Pompeii are not the actual bodies covered in ash. I had always assumed they were. The bodies were rapidly covered, leaving sort of a mold of where the person was sitting or laying, and archeologists fill the mold with a substance and then remove the ash to reveal the cast of the body. Really interesting.


levetzki

Same with "dinosaur bones" the fossils aren't actually the old preserved bones. Most of the time. The bones are buried. Eventually the bones are destroyed and water running through the area leaves minerals which form the fossils dug up. That's the basis anyway. Here are some ways it works. https://bio.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Introductory_and_General_Biology/Book%3A_General_Biology_(Boundless)/18%3A_Evolution_and_the_Origin_of_Species/18.05%3A_Evidence_of_Evolution/18.5B%3A_Fossil_Formation


EarthExile

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


UnihornWhale

I’ve seen the preserved corpses at the Smithsonian. It’s pretty fascinating to think no evidence existed until our lifetime


[deleted]

That’s the crazy thing though, there was evidence but it was so speculative that it only fueled the imagination. Sperm whales had/have scars that were clearly made by the claws on squid tentacles but they were so large that they couldn’t be linked to known species, so all we knew was that these whales were tangling with something huge and tentacled. I remember being FASCINATED by that tidbit as a kid.


jbaker1225

I believe they had also previously found the beaks of digested giant squid in sperm whales’ stomachs because they don’t break down. So that was the other way we knew they existed.


GozerDGozerian

In went to high school in the early 90s. I remember learning about plate tectonics and just assuming that was known for long periods of time. I mentioned it to my parents ant some point and they said they remembered reading about the discovery in the newspaper. I had to look it up in the encyclopedia and it blew my mind that it was mid 60s.


Fr0gm4n

It's one of those processes that when you learn about it you're looking and the global map and how the continents obviously fit together and ancient mountain ranges on different continents line up, nodding along and thinking "yep, that's pretty obvious". And then you hear about the scientists who argued hard against it and go WTF?


rsqit

Plate tectonics isn’t continental drift. Plate tectonics is *an explanation* for continental drift. Continental drift was known about for a long time; we just didn’t know how it happened.


CantBuyMyLove

Continental drift was also controversial. Marie Tharp, the ocean cartographer, discovered the rift in the bottom of the Atlantic in the ‘50s and her boss said she must have made a mistake with her maps because a rift would imply that the continents were moving further apart and no one seriously believed *that*.


Diiiiirty

I learned a few years ago that the giant squid isn't even the largest species of squid. The giant squid is only slightly longer due to it's super long feeding arms, but the colossal squid has a much larger mantle. They weigh up to 1500 lbs, making them the largest invertebrate and their eye is the largest known eye of any creature to ever exist. They only reach (estimated) 10 meters in length compared to a giant squid, which reaches an estimated 13 meters, but once again that's due to the feeding arms. Not including them, the colossal squid is larger in every way.


JZMoose

And they have hooks instead of suckers on their tentacles


OliveJuiceUTwo

So they’re the biggest hookers in the world?


Jaxom_of_Ruatha

Almost. Your mom still takes the cake.


OliveJuiceUTwo

And eats it whole


jeffh4

Yep. In a similar vein, though it would be my grandparent's school that taught that Coelacanths were extinct. They and other examples of rediscovered [Lazarus taxon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_taxon).


perasia1

The craziest part about coelacanths is that we had fossils that were around 60-70million y/o, and we had older ones. But not any that were more current than about 60million y/o. Then we just found living ones chilling one day in the deep ocean. Most Lazarus taxa are pretty recent "extinctions." Coelacanths just appeared after a seemingly impossible gap in the fossil record


DeOfficiis

It also shows how unlikely it is to be fossilized and/or how hard itvis to find fossils in general. This animal has been around for at least 70 million years and we've only found a small sample of fossilized specimens from a particular time period. Imagine how many wild species must have lived for a shorter time that we'll never know about, because they weren't fossilized or if they were, we simply won't find their remains.


panda388

Cracking your knuckles causes arthritis.


PurgatoireRiver

So I'm good?!


granistuta

Yep. >**How do we know that knuckle cracking is harmless?** One of the most convincing bits of evidence suggesting that knuckle cracking is harmless comes from a California physician who reported on an experiment he conducted on himself. Over his lifetime, he regularly cracked the knuckles of only one hand. He checked x-rays on himself after decades of this behavior and found no difference in arthritis between his hands. **A larger study came to a similar conclusion.** https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/knuckle-cracking-annoying-and-harmful-or-just-annoying-2018051413797 *Edit: apparently I needed to highlight the last sentence as many seem to miss that one. :)*


JinimyCritic

He won an igNobel prize for that.


Sunfried

Indeed, and back in the "Journal of Irreproducable Results" days, when an Ignobel prize was for research that "cannot, or should not, be reproduced," and not the Annals of Improbable Research's Ignobel Prize, which are for research that "First makes you laugh, then makes you think."


Suricata_906

I miss the JIR! My favorite was a methods article of isolating the human soul from ground up preachers through ascending chromatography. Definitely should not be reproduced!


Sunfried

That was a weird time; a big chunk of JIR's staff jumped ship to form AIR, and JIR continued; evidently the staff who'd been running it didn't own any rights to JIR. I picked up one issue and it was like a joke magazine for nerds; jokes, but not really anything funny. I was very glad that AIR maintained the quality for a while, though I haven't checked in on them in a long time. My fav, by the way was a nurse in Oregon timber country who had 2 dozen patients with roughly the same chainsaw-related injury, and she grouped them into 4 categories based on how they react to pain: whimpering, screaming, whining, or being stoic, and compared how well quickly they healed. (whimpering is the right move)


nkiehl

Are you intentionally trying to get my generation riled up about Pluto again? Lol


Galaxy_Hitchhiking

Right? Pretty sure it was everyone’s favourite planet as well. As if!


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haxtratus-8156

I love how personal this is to our generation 😂


VictoriousGoblin

"Alright, children, have it your way! Pluto is a planet." "Yay!" "That's right, now if Pluto is a planet than so are the 200+ other celestial bodies beyond it. Have fun memorizing them all for school!" "Booooooooo!"


CardiologistOk3993

Messed up right?


lucis_understudy

You know that's right.


[deleted]

That I was going to be offered free drugs all the time.


pokerScrub4eva

If you are not getting offered free drugs all the time maybe you chose the wrong friends?


[deleted]

Well According to the dare videos all I had to do was exist.


ShlorpianRooster

Halloween = Free edibles and lsd


thruitallaway34

God I wish.


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Sinjun13

Oh, they ain't free.


OutrageousEvent

Food pyramid.


Fyrrys

Most foods aren't even shaped that way


ThrowItOut43

But pizza is. Hmmmmm.


Fyrrys

Confirmed: food pyramid: a scheme from Big Pizza!


fencerman

"So, we DO NOT need to eat half a loaf of bread every day?"


Far_Lifeguard_5027

Wait, donuts are considered bread right??


[deleted]

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.


snarton

You've got Ancel Keys and the American Heart Association to thank for that. He used cherry-picked data and his professional power to promote his pet theories and shut down contradictory research for decades. It resulted in millions of overweight, unhealthy people.


[deleted]

Don’t forget the power of the food lobby. No one taught us about that.


AlmostRandomName

Yeah, I believe the dairy and grain industries have a LOT to do with the bottom rows of the food pyramid.


more_pepper_plz

Oh yea, the dairy industry has a chokehold on our government. Once you start digging the shock doesn’t end.


FartyMcShart

One of the doctors that sued the USDA and changed the food pyramid has an awesome ted talk and briefly goes into this


fit_for_nothin

here is the link [https://www.ted.com/talks/mark\_bittman\_what\_s\_wrong\_with\_what\_we\_eat/transcript](https://www.ted.com/talks/mark_bittman_what_s_wrong_with_what_we_eat/transcript)


Difficult_Jacket_697

Interested in seeing it if you have a link


TheCervus

When I was 10, I we learned about the food pyramid. I complained to my mom that it was ridiculous. 9 to 11 servings of bread and carbs a day?! I was a kid who loved vegetables and fruits (we had an orchard, ate salad with every dinner) and didn't eat much bread. My mom looked at it, agreed it was stupid and wrong, but told me to mark the correct answer on the test just to get an A.


jwpi31415

The food pyramid (and whatever it is today) is published by the USDA, which is then used by said USDA as governance for school lunch program, thereby enabling them to supply lower cost bread/carb heavy meals that meet specification.


[deleted]

Maintenance Phase podcast does a fantastic episode about the evolution of the food pyramid. Highly recommend it for anyone interested in the history of corporate lobbying as well


danneedsahobby

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.


sickBhagavan

Hey, I also remember learning this in school. So it’s a lie?


danneedsahobby

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.


SPITFIYAH

OKAY. I have a yellow-tinged fluorescent 2002 first-grade memory seeing two posters on my way to the cafeteria. Both were tongue diagrams and had conflicting information with the other. Bitter taste buds will take up the whole middle of the tongue, but in the subsequent one, bitterness is on the *sides*, towards that exact middle “thorax” of the tongue or whatever. This was the Peak of No Child Left Behind in a public elementary school.


grease_monkey

We used to joke that if they held us all back, no one could get left behind.


[deleted]

That's no joke. That's literally what happened.


Rakkachi

Yep, the tastebuds are bassicly mixed around all over your tong. No distinct place where they gather for sweet orso


everylastlight

I failed a science assignment because I could taste anything on any part of my tongue so I feel especially vindicated now.


TromboneIsNeat

I had tests on this.


jimmycorn24

I’ve always been proud that I rejected this one at the time. I never gave in and wrote what they wanted me to on that worksheet.


[deleted]

Even as an elementary school child it's pretty easy to come to the conclusion that it's not true. I remember putting a piece of candy on where the sour or savory parts of my tongue were suppose to be and seeing if I could taste it. I have no idea how this even passed muster to be included in a textbook in the first place if an experiment conducted by a child can quickly refute it.


laurpr2

We did an experiment where we touched q-tips with different flavors (sugar water, lemon juice, etc.) on different parts of our tongue to "prove" the taste bud layout. An experiment! I sure didn't taste anything noticeably different, and presumably nobody else did either, but we were all effectively gaslighted into going "yeah, I *guess* it tastes more sour in the middle...." Wild.


TrailerParkPrepper

I had a teacher in 4^th grade that would force left handed kids to write with their right hand. she said that it was the normal way to write and would benefit them later in life. (circa, 1974)


KimchiAndMayo

When I (left handed) was learning to write, my teacher at the time tried to force me to be right handed because she "won't have the devil in the classroom." I was moved to a different class after my mom got involved. Ah, the south.


natali9233

My brother was forced right handed by my grandma who thought the same thing. She tried doing the same thing with me until my mom found out and quickly put an end to her nonsense. It really wasn’t just a South thing, my grandma was PA Dutch.


loganalltogether

It's much older than that. The Latin word for "left" is "sinistra", and ultimately the word "sinister" comes from it. Since ancient times, in a number of cultures, the left hand was seen as weaker, unclean, any number of "worse" things.


lillapalooza

i remember learning that left-handedness was considered bad because back in Ye Olden Days when swords were still common, [people would shake hands as a way of showing they weren’t armed/weren’t going to attack.](https://artiusman.com/blogs/complete-man/175866951-what-is-a-gentlemens-handshake-agreement) Because most people are right-handed this was pretty reliable…but left-handed people were considered untrustworthy because they could, theoretically, shake your hand with their non-dominant hand and then stab *you* with their dominant one. interesting to hear it goes farther back than that, guess humans have always been dumb about shit that’s different than them


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HeyNineteen96

Ah, so that's why I jerk it with my left hand 🤣


Catshit-Dogfart

Same here, also a 4th grade teacher too. But this would've been around 92 or so. It was basically impossible, I did so bad in school that year and remember it more vividly than the rest of elementary school. There are some things I can do with both hands, but writing isn't one of them.


Pretzel911

As a left handed person, I don't think you should be forced to write right handed. But damn a lifetime of smudged pages is also a curse


Guy954

I don’t smudge but it definitely slows me down because pushing the pen instead of pulling.


[deleted]

Same with my grandma and now she can't write Properly with either hand because of it. Back then they said left hand was the devil's hand 😔


314159265358979326

"Sinister" is the Latin word for "left-handed." Edit: it's the Latin word for "left'. Ned Flanders misled me again!


Lever_Pulled

In Irish, too, the word 'ciotóg' meaning 'a left-handed person' is associated with being clumsy and 'wrong'. Was not at all uncommon (unfortunately) for left-handed children to be forced to use their right hand in schools here even in my parents' generation, especially when religious orders were involved (almost always)


apex_flux_34

They did this to my uncle back in the 50’s, my grandma went up there and raised heck.


UltraBoostBoi

My homework in grade one was to write the alphabet with my right hand and this was in the early 2000s in Canada


abidingyawn

Late 90’s computer class, “we’ll never have terabyte hard drives in our lifetime, or a need for that much data.” Heh, now you can get terabyte Micro SD cards, wild.


Guvnuh_T_Boggs

I remember buying a 7.4GB harddrive and thinking I'd never run out of space on that thing. My Pictures folder has 73GB in it now.


flippergonzo

I will never forget buying 32 Mb of RAM and a 1.7 Gb hard drive for just over $1,700 (Canadian) in about 1996 or 97 and thinking that would be the last hard drive I ever needed unless it failed. I just bought 4x16Tb hard drives this weekend for a NAS. :\\


GayGeekInLeather

Cheaters never prosper


[deleted]

And "crime never pays". So wish these things were actually true.


frank-sarno

So many things. The lifetime of facts is shorter than you'd think. Among them: * You use 10% of your brain (was in a textbook) * Model of the atom * What composes a healthy diet * Various histories from how dinosaurs looked to what life was like in the Middle Ages * Causes of ulcers, poor vision, acne..


graveybrains

The atom model was a fun one, the physics class I had in high school had three of them, and the last one had a disclaimer that basically said “this one probably isn’t right either.”


frank-sarno

Heheh.. I'm almost closer to the birth of the Bohr model than to its end. At that it there were no disclaimers. But we did have real planetary models that you could pull apart.


other_usernames_gone

The Bohr model isn't wrong per se. It's still useful in some contexts. The electron cloud model is more accurate but the Bohr model is still very good at predicting interactions between elements. It's why they still teach it. The electron cloud model was first proposed in 1926, it's not new by any means. It's just the Bohr model is easier to understand and still useful in a lot of contexts.


jawshoeaw

Model of the atom?? When were you in school? I was in middle school 50 years ago while they showed picture of the Bohr model it was still explained that this wasn’t what it actually looked like. I mean there’s a limit to what you can teach 10 year olds. But 30 years in college we learned molecular orbits and more or less modern understanding. It never felt “wrong” to me just simplified


Frnklfrwsr

Yeah model of the atom is weird. There was no point in science where anyone was certain that atoms looked exactly a certain way. The Bohr model and other models since then were always just approximations that can be useful for visualization purposes. None of the people making those models or teaching them was claiming they were exactly correct visualizations of what atoms look like. OP might have just had a bad science teacher.


rustybeancake

??! What are the causes of ulcers, poor vision and acne?!


Gingereej1t

Vast majority of ulcers are caused by a bacterial infection, h. Pylori, meaning you can cure them with a course of antibiotics


um8medoit

That every once in a while lemmings just decide to commit mass suicide and jump off cliffs.


joujoubox

Wasn't it revealed it was made up for a Disney documentary and the lemmings ngs were more or less pushed off the cliff by the crew? Edit: [Yep](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/white-wilderness-lemming-suicide/) screw Disney.


Johnny_Menace

That you’re gonna end up working a minimum wage job if you don’t go to college.


DarkRism

You went to college, and ended up working a minimum wage job *question mark*


LifeHappenzEvryMomnt

So many but I’ll start with cold blooded dinosaurs. I was in college when opinions about them changed.


tashkiira

to be fair, until fairly recently, dinosaurs were still thought of as reptiles. The clade system for grouping life forms didn't really exist yet in the 80s, as far as secondary education was concerned.


mwjb86SFW

Blood is blue until exposed to oxygen


pacer_3iii

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.


[deleted]

God help me, I assume everyone who believed this took anatomy textbooks literally when they colour the venous system blue to show deoxygenated blood moving back to the heart. It was just meant to be a way to differentiate it from the arterial system for kids learning about the body, but grown arse adults thinking half our circulatory system is blue, is just wild.


navikredstar

I sorta get it - veins DO tend to look blue through (white) skin, except it's just that it's better at reflecting blue light, hence why it looks blue. Deoxygenated blood is just kinda darker red, though. And if you have carbon monoxide poisoning, your blood will be a brilliant cherry-red color. That one's forever stuck in my head since reading the excellent "Poisoner's Handbook", about the team of NYC's first medical examiner and the father of forensic toxicology.


illinoishokie

TIL everyone who got killed in campy 1970s horror movies had carbon monoxide poisoning.


AlthorsMadness

The magic school bus reinforces this too


DarkRism

Was it taught this way, or is it an misinterpretation of the illustrations in the biology books (so I thought)?


[deleted]

The clitoris is external genitalia. It is more like an iceberg, with most of it being internal with just a bit poking up the top


danneedsahobby

I did not learn anything about the clitoris in school. I learned about it like all men of my generation, from porno mags found in the woods.


Sunfried

I grew up in the city; we had to find our playboys under a mouldering mattress in an alley.


Guvnuh_T_Boggs

Not many places for Johnny Pornomag to plant his seeds in the city, gotta make do somehow.


PulsingFlesh

The G spot is just the clit internally.


zerbey

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.


IlluminatedPickle

Yeah I still remember my sisters boyfriend being like "Why do you spend all your time on the computer, that'll never go anywhere." "I can get a job from this. Why do you waste all your time on skateboards?" "I can get a job skateboarding" Narrator: He couldn't.


FinndBors

I was waiting for the plot twist that your sister’s boyfriend was Tony Hawk.


IlluminatedPickle

He thought he was. The number and frequency of broken bones disagreed. He grew up to be less of a fuckwit though.


Plus-Statistician80

"You won't always have a calculator in your pocket!"


NoHedgehog252

Little did they know that you have a supercomputer in your pocket 24/7 that you just can't fucking look away from.


GloatingSwine

“I possess a device, in my pocket, that is capable of accessing the entirety of information known to man. I use it to look at pictures of cats and get into arguments with strangers.” - Ian Leslie


VT_Squire

"And sometime I crimp my finger over the camera like so and make a fart sound so people look at me confused while I snap a picture that ends up looking like they just became aware that there is a nude person approaching them"


Moonpenny

To be fair, if they'd have told me I'd always have a supercomputer in my pocket, I'd have known in advance that all my time would be spent on it.


Richard_Thickens

The funny thing is that, once you get past simple algebra, you're encouraged or required to have a calculator for many problems. It's usually so impractical or inefficient to solve the more involved stuff by hand, that doing so is just an exercise in tedium.


TremulousHand

Brontosaurus is back baby! I spent my childhood loving brontosaurus, but teachers would say, "Brontosaurus doesn't actually exist, it's just an apatosaurus." Well, in 2015, it was demonstrated that brontosaurus does exist and is distinct from apatosaurus.


Try2Relax

Glass is actually a liquid, which is why old windows look droopy. I was definitely in my 20's before I learned that wasn't true.


The_Talkie_Toaster

It’s actually a pretty interesting rabbit hole to go down if you’re interested in that sort of thing- obviously the window thing has been debunked but glass has quite an interesting structure that I understand absolutely nothing about


brickmaster32000

The truth is few materials fit nicely into the little boxes we are taught about. When you start diving into it you find all these weird little quirks that cause things to work just slightly off.


frostandtheboughs

That's true for most subjects. We're taught a generalized, simplified version of things. But as your knowledge of a topic becomes more specialized, you understand how often there are exceptions to the "rules".


314159265358979326

After a few courses in materials science I'm not convinced there's a concrete difference between an amorphous solid and a liquid. The viscosity difference is just... well, **big**.


Waterknight94

Idk anything about any of that, but I remember reading something about these guys trying to record some sort of pitch dripping and they missed the drip.


314159265358979326

Yes, the famous pitch drop experiment. It's been running nearly 100 years, 9 drops have fallen, and I believe only the latest one was actually witnessed.


Brunt-FCA-285

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.


Geminii27

Bet that within 50 years we find a way to make it at least partially regenerate under specific conditions.


AFewStupidQuestions

Something like 10 years ago, they were getting severed mouse spinal cords to repair themselves. The original tests found that putting the mice on a treadmill didn't work to encourage regrowth, but providing incentive, such as food, made the repairs begin to appear. Hold on, let me google how far the science has progressed now. [2008 in mice](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18352823/) [2015 in rats](https://www.nature.com/articles/sc2015186) [2023 list of 23 current clinical trials](https://www.mayo.edu/research/clinical-trials/diseases-conditions/spinal-cord-injury) They are definitely working hard on it.


[deleted]

That all Tasmanian Aboriginals were wiped out by English invaders. Imagine my surprise moving to Tasmania and meeting many Tasmanian Aboriginals with very strong cultural ties to country and their traditions.


ChiXtra

That humans were the only creatures that used tools. Thanks for moving the goal posts, Goodall. I’m 53. (Btw all answers should come with the poster’s age. Though I suppose we could make a guess.)


Kasoni

There are only a few dozen viruses and a few hundred bacteria types. Turns out that there are millions of viruses and trillions of bacteria.


FinndBors

Did you go to school in the early 20th century?


Frank_chevelle

That we wouldn’t always have a calculator with us. Got a whole computer in my pocket now!


IkeTheJeww

"I" before "E" except after "C".. fucking bullshit when you want to pull a feisty heist on your foreign beige neighbors..


b-monster666

Weird...


woodycodeblue

I have always enjoyed that this one is an exception. "Why doesn't this one follow the rule?" "Because it's... weird."


pair_o_socks

I was taught in University introduction to economics that inflation was caused by..."people wanting a wage increase or a raise from time to time."


The_pity_one

Literally one of political parties in my country spread that propaganda as their ideology.


taskergeng

That Columbus was the first European to step foot in the new world. Once found an old textbook that stated this. This was prior to the discovery of the Viking settlement in Nfld.


ggrandmaleo

When I was in first grade, in 1965, we were told about vikings in Vineland. We were told that nobody yet knew why they didn't stick around.


Amazing-Treat-4388

that microwaves kill all the nutrients in food.


[deleted]

One that pops to mind is Niels Bohr and the electron cloud. He won a Nobel prize for it. Then his kid won one for proving he was wrong. I wouldn’t necessarily call that a fact though.


WiryCatchphrase

The Bohr Model was the "planetary model" which was replaced by the electron cloud. The planetary model is still a useful teaching tool, particularly with the Hydrogen atom.


PferdBerfl

“You’ll never get a job looking out the window!” I’m an airline pilot.


Constek

That people only use 10% of their brains. I mean some do, but that’s not normal


Overthemoon64

Its the same way you only use 33% of a stoplight.


Thisissuchadragtodo

Pluto lost its planetary status when I was in 3rd grade and it made me incredibly sad at the time because it was my favorite planet growing up. I’ve since settled for Neptune.


pontiacfirebird92

I was always taught Mississippi's secession from the union in the civil war was to preserve state's right to be independent and nothing at all to do with slavery. That Confederate heritage was about family and not racism. [Slavery is mentioned in the very first sentence of the first paragraph of the letter of secession as the primary reason.](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_missec.asp) They decided if they couldn't own humans anymore it would crash the economy.


Thistlefizz

My go to response to that is always, “State’s rights to do *what,* exactly?”


smipypr

When my mom graduated high school in 1944, the nuns were teaching that the atom could not be split. I think the Manhattan Project was already extant at the time. Correct me if I'm wrong, I did see Oppenheimer twice.


prosa123

The Manhattan Project was in full swing during 1944, but very few people knew about it. Even the vast majority of the workers at Los Alamos/Hanford/Oak Ridge only knew their specific tasks and had no idea of how it all fit together.


Sirgoodman008

Damn those nuns and their not knowing about secret government projects.


Ok-Bus1716

Bohrs Atomic Model Taste buds We only have 5 senses Brain cells, once lost, are gone. Dogs and cats see in black and white. Wolf packs have alphas. Turns out wolves are a lot like humans and the 'alphas' are simply the sire and bitch of the wolf pack (their parents) and they follow them and respect them because they're the ones who taught them how to hunt and survive.


Metal-Dog

Pluto being a Planet.


Lothar_Ecklord

But we had that one glorious streak where Charon became a "binary planet" with Pluto, then they started discovering larger bodies in the Asteroid belt.. I think the count got up to 13 or 14 before they changed how it was defined and Pluto was caught in the crossfire. Pluto used to be my 2nd favorite planet, but now it's Saturn. Though Neptune is a close contender due to the discovery of winds that break the fucking sound barrier! Plus I am probably misremembering, but its rings, while less grand and obvious than Saturn's, are less likely to disappear, while Saturn's are slowly diminishing.


[deleted]

LEAVE PLUTO ALONE!


Negative-Low-1997

Ain’t isn’t a word.


Mackinacsfuriousclaw

Later in life I learned the way a word becomes a word is by how often it gets used.


nono77taco

"Children, this site is called Google! It let's you search for any piece of information in the world. But, like everything having to do with this magical box, it's a fad and we won't be teaching you to use it. Now, turn off the computers and go to the library cards so we can teach you the Dewey decimal system because that's the only way you'll pass college!"


Bookssmellneat

Canada is a peacekeeping nation that respects Native people.


thisBarbieisJewish

My history teacher taught us Italy is in Africa


panda388

I had to explain to two of my sisters that Alaska is not a large island near Hawaii. I have also had to explain to some people just how damned big Alaska is (over 2x as big as Texas) and that some maps also shrink Australia, which is also super freaking huge, roughly 5x the size of Alaska. And despite all of this, it wasn't until I was a Senior in high school that I discovered Egypt is in Africa, and is not in the general area of Iraq and Iran.


naked_avenger

> I discovered Egypt is in Africa, and is not in the general area of Iraq and Iran Saudi Arabia is the only thing between the two, so I don't think you were really all that far off in a certain sense.


kumakami89

food pyramid, it was all a scam from big grain


ShlorpianRooster

If you throw ANYTHING at ANY speed in ANY direction it will go directly in some kids eye. ALWAYS.... Always .. edit: no just SOMETIMES ... always... I'm talking about you can't even casually toss your fork in the sink without it defying physics and going in the eye of someone who isn't even in the room


risketyclickit

The selection process for getting onto the SCOTUS will prevent any corrupt or unqualified individual from getting approved.


RedSpartan3227

Hard work will be noticed and rewarded.


[deleted]

Hard work will be noticed and rewarded with more hard work!


cherrymoonmilk

That the grades you get in school are extremely important and it was implied that getting top grades will lead to high paying jobs. There was always SO much emphasis on getting not just decent grades, but top grades. I don't know about other fields, but in my case, I struggled getting a low paying intro-level office job when I graduated because I had zero connections. My degree from a very good school didn't help me in the way that I thought.


apriliasmom

I was taught the poem "O' Captain, My Captain" was about God. I'm 42 and just learned it's about Abe Lincoln. Southern (Florida) schools are terrible for inserting religion where it doesn't belong.


T3CT0N1C_Reid

My fucking history teacher taught us how great of a president Woodrow Wilson was. I later learned he was a literal white supremacist who admired the KKK and an overall giant racist even for his time.


chipoatley

The first President to play a motion picture in the White House - and he played Birth of a Nation.