Get ready to have your mind blown by Ask Reddit.
1. No one was ever burned at the Salem witch trials. They were all either hanged, died in jail, or crushed by rocks.
2. It’s not dangerous to wake a sleepwalker. They won’t have a heart attack or be put into a coma. They’ll just be confused and it won’t be pleasant for them, that’s it.
3. The beverage used by Jim Jones to kill all of those people was not Kool-aid, it was another brand called “Flavor-aid”.
4. You can put birds back in their nests. The mother will not reject them.
5. It’s commonly said that, “Lightning never strikes twice in the same place.” In fact, it does – and frequently.
6. You most probably weren’t the fastest sperm cell. The egg has an outer protective layer that takes several sperm to wear down before fertilization. Honestly, you were probably one of the slowest sperm cells who arrived too late to do any work but still won the race of life. Also, the egg actually has a number of chemical barriers that select sperm with certain attractive chemical markers. The egg actually chooses which packet of DNA makes it to fertilization.
7. Humans don’t eat 8 spiders a year in their sleep. Spiders generally like cool, dry places. The inside of your mouth is not an appealing place for them.
8. “We only use 10% of our brainpower.”
More specifically, you use all of your brain, but use different parts at different times, rather than all at once.
This is why you never hear doctors saying, “Thank god, he got shot in the 90% of the brain that doesn’t do anything.”
9. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day… Kellogs paid researchers to create studies confirming that statement and started using it as a slogan to sell more cereal.
10. Napolean wasn’t short, he was actually 5’7 which was considered average-to-tall height for the time.
Apparently the only way we can surmise that the urban legend started that he was short was because of the difference between English and French Imperial units, which led to his height seeming small by British figures.
11. “The penis is a muscle.” False.
The penis consists of a unique tissue that inflates with blood and restricts the blood from leaving, which inflates the tissue and creates an erection. The same type of tissue exists in your nose, which is why you get a stuffy nose from sneezing/crying/allergies, all of which increase blood flow to the face.
12. Cow Tipping. Cows don’t sleep standing up, the ones standing are usually on like a guard duty to alert the others who are sleeping should a danger arise. No one is sneaking up on an awake cow and pushing it over.
13. The belief that “Jingle Bells” was written to be a Christmas song. Wrong. It was intended to be a Thanksgiving song.
14. Dogs do not see in black and white. They can see some color, it just looks really washed out.
15. There’s no solid division between left and right brain. The left side can learn “right-brain” skills and vice-versa.
16. Eating carrots doesn’t improve your eyesight.
In WWII, the British had come up with a novel way to spot incoming German bombing raids – radar. But to keep the Germans from discovering it, they attributed their AMAZING ability to spot airplanes at night to their AA crews eating lots of carrots.
Thanks to British deadpan humor, people have been believing this crap for 80+ years.
17. You shouldn’t tilt your head back if you have a nosebleed. It causes the blood to run backwards and down the throat, and you can choke on it, or it could even enter your stomach.
18. Decimate doesn’t mean to completely wipe out. It means to remove 10%.
19. Chameleons do not solely change color based on the background. It’s based on health, temperature, and mood.
20. “The AR in AR-15 stands for assault rifle.” It actually stands stands for Armalite, the company that engineered the rifle.
21. You don’t defibrillate someone to revive them from death. Defibrillators are used to fix irregular heartbeats. Not restart a stopped heart.
22. That hot water opens your pores and cold water closes them. Your pores don’t change! The only difference is that hot water can be drying to the skin whereas cold water isn’t, and drying out your skin again and again can cause it to over produce sebum, developing zits on the face and body (if you have acne prone skin). But also don’t make out that hot water is the devil! It’s really good for relaxing your muscles.
23. That a tomato isn’t a vegetable. A tomato is technically a fruit in the botanical sense because there’s no such thing as a vegetable in botany. Vegetable is a culinary term and a tomato would be classified as one.
24. That there are only three states of matter: solid, liquid and gas. There is also plasma as well as other special situations such as superfluids.
25. That Adolf Hitler was an atheist. Actually Hitler was raised Roman Catholic. But when he wrote Mein Kampf he believed that God created the people. SS members were also required to believe in God as well. Hitler also referenced God in many of his speeches.
26. Period blood doesn’t just flow out constantly, it can stop for a while and continue. One time my flow stopped for an entire day and I stopped wearing pads because I thought my period was over, just to be happily reminded that my body hates me by staining my favorite jeans the next day (and continuing to do so for a few more days).
27. The phrase wasn’t, “Luke, I am your father.” It was, “No, I, am your father.”
28. Shit is all digested and unprocessable food waste. When really up to 50% of it is dead bacteria cells.
29. That fish have a 3 second memory. They have up to a 3 year memory.
30. Gladiator games in ancient Rome were not “two men go in, one comes out.”
The figure I’ve seen in most studies is a chance of 1:9 for a gladiator to die during a munus that he took part in. That’s huge, of course… but still means that, in most cases, it wasn’t a fight to the death.
31. Blood isn’t blue when there’s no oxygen in it, blood vessels just appear blue under the skin due to the way light is absorbed. In actuality, blood is red when it has oxygen in it and dark red when it doesn’t.
32. “Daddy long legs” are not very venomous, they can bite you (but are just mostly docile), and they’re actually not even spiders. They are opiliones, a relative of spiders. A bite from would would be about as bad as a mosquito bite.
33. Mount Everest is the tallest mountain. If you’re talking about sea level you are right, but if you’re talking about from when it starts going up it’s Mauna Kea in Hawaii, because most of it is under water. 
