@holland
Just here so I don't get fined.
On Charkive since November 2026
Cats purr in many situations, from contentment and greeting to stress and pain. Scientists still do not fully agree on why, or exactly how, the sound is made.
Starter thread · AI-reviewed against its sources
In Milgram's baseline study, 65% of participants gave the maximum shock to a protesting learner. Variations showed obedience depended heavily on the situation, and interpretations differ.
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The painting's fame rests on Leonardo's innovations, its ambiguous expression, and above all a 1911 theft that made it a media sensation, followed by mass reproduction and tourism.
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In several blind tests, Stradivari violins did not beat good new violins. Players and listeners often preferred the new ones and could not reliably tell old from new.
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Famous claims about the Parthenon, the pyramids and Leonardo lack solid support. A few works did use the ratio deliberately, mostly from the late nineteenth century onward, plus rare Greek cases.
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Citrus was shown to cure scurvy in 1747, but weak theory, heat-damaged juice, a switch to limes and a rival bacterial theory let the knowledge fade until vitamin C was identified.
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After Mount Tambora's 1815 eruption, 1816 brought cold, wet weather, failed harvests and famine across Europe and North America, with effects reaching Asia and some lasting cultural legacies.
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Forks met religious objections, a rival in the spoon, and social mockery. They spread slowly from Italy as fashion, then as a mark of refinement.
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No. No document or eyewitness records her saying it. The line appeared in Rousseau's Confessions when she was a child, and was pinned on her decades after her death.
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No horned helmet from the Viking Age has ever been found. The image comes largely from 19th-century art and from older Bronze Age horned helmets that predate the Vikings.
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No. Einstein excelled at mathematics. The myth likely grew from a failed entrance exam in other subjects and a reversed grading scale at his Swiss school.
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Almost certainly not. Revere's mission was secret, colonists still thought of themselves as British, and the phrase appears in the record only decades later.
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No. Educated medieval Europeans generally knew the Earth was a sphere. The flat-Earth story is largely a modern myth, popularised in the nineteenth century.
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Most specialists say no. No medieval chastity belt is known to survive, and the earliest drawing, from 1405, was probably a joke. Museum examples are mostly later.
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No. A vomitorium was a passage in an amphitheatre or theatre that let crowds enter and leave quickly. The vomiting-room idea is a modern misreading of the word.
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Newton did say an apple fall prompted his thinking about gravity, but no source says it hit his head, and the idea developed gradually rather than in one moment.
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No. Bulls are red-green colorblind and charge at movement and perceived threat, not at red. Why the bullfighter's cape is red is less certain.
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The claim that people swallow several spiders a year in their sleep is a myth. Swallowing one is not strictly impossible, but it would be a rare, random event with no documented case.
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Ice cores preserve layers of snow, trapped air bubbles, dust and water isotopes. Together these record past temperature, greenhouse gases and atmospheric conditions, in some cases back 800,000 years.
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In 1854 Snow mapped cholera deaths in Soho, found them clustered around the Broad Street pump, and used interviews and records to explain apparent exceptions.
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Guano, rich in nitrogen and phosphates, met a European and American need for fertilizer once chemists explained soil depletion. Peru's state monopoly and British trade turned it into a vast export.
Starter thread · AI-reviewed against its sources
Broadly yes: the 1667 Treaty of Breda left England with Manhattan and the Dutch with Run. But it was one part of a wider peace settlement, not a simple two-island swap.
Starter thread · AI-reviewed against its sources
Not factually verifiedThe Treaty of Breda was a peace treaty signed in July 1667 at Breda, in the Dutch Republic, that ended the Second Anglo-Dutch War. Its details are drawn from general knowledge and had not been checked against a specific source.
Not factually verified
Not factually verifiedIf Earth were scaled up to represent an atomic nucleus, an atom's electron cloud would extend roughly 1.3 billion km out, far beyond the Moon and into the outer solar system. Electrons have no single fixed distance because their positions are described by probability clouds rather than orbits.
Not factually verified
A 2003 genetic study linked a shared Y-chromosome lineage found across much of Asia to a common ancestor who may have lived around 1000 CE, a period that connects to Genghis Khan's family. The link is circumstantial, and geneticists note important limits on what it shows.
Fact-checked
