Surprising Myths That Are Actually True

Everyone’s experienced it. You’re at a social occasion where someone’s telling a story that happened to some guy they know, and you can’t help but think hold up, that can’t be true. Like how a buddy of theirs had a snake swim up through their bathroom toilet, or how they heard superglue is strong enough to stick furniture to the ceiling. Or even that the Dalai Lama worked for the CIA.

But here’s the crazy part. All of those, and many more so-called myths, are actually factual! Let’s unpack some of the craziest stories and claims you probably always thought were nonsense, proven to be true.

Turning A Room Upside Down With Glue

For several decades now, one myth has stuck around about rock bands with a love for pranks back in the 1970s. According to rumors, certain rock stars would use super glue to stick furniture to the ceilings of their hotel rooms. Then, the next day, they’d leave it as a surprise for the hotel staff.

While the specifics of who those bands were have been lost either to time, or lawsuits the premise remains an intriguing one. But could it have actually happened? For starters, Gorilla Glue demonstrated the impressive strength of their particular brand back in 2008.

They managed to lift an entire truck, laden with additional weights to the total of 8,000 lbs, using two steel plates Gorilla Glued together and secured to a crane! The world’s greatest verifiers of myths, the MythBusters also put that question to the test back in 2012.

Through a series of experiments, the crew were able to determine that a single drop of standard, generic brand super glue could secure as much as 2,891 Newtons of Force, or 650lbs weight without giving way. A mere 7 drops lifted a 4,000lb station wagon!

Seriously impressive stuff and all made possible thanks to the unique chemical properties of super strength adhesives. That stuff sticks thanks to chemical reactions triggered by moisture on an object’s surface, which rapidly form molecular bonds between the glue and the surface. Those bonds strengthen as the glue seeps into any tiny cracks in an object’s surface, forming a very secure bond indeed.

With that knowledge, and with their experiments seeming hopeful, the MythBusters set to work on putting the hotel room furniture super glue myth to the test. With a generous dousing of adhesive on the underside of several items of furniture, they hoisted them up to the ceiling and allowed the glue to set. The result? A total success.

Of course, if you’re interested in literally turning your house upside down like that, you’d need to make sure your ceilings were strong enough to withstand the downward force of heavy furniture. Otherwise, you might be left with a mess that’d take more than some superglue to fix.

Dalai Lama’s CIA Secret

If someone told you the Dalai Lama used to work for the CIA, you’d be reasonable to assume it’s total baloney. But as surprising as it seems, the claim is actually true! Of course, Gelug Buddhism’s global leader wasn’t exactly carrying out covert CIA operations wearing dark sunglasses and an earpiece, as fun as that may be to visualize.

It went a little differently in reality. Like many of history’s strangest recent moments, it came in the midst of the Cold War, when America was doing all it could to undermine the global spread of communism. As part of that, between the late 50s and mid 70s, the Dalai Lama received $180,000 a year from the CIA.

©christopher via Wikimedia Commons

That money was part of a wider effort to uphold support for anti Chinese sentiment after Tibet was annexed by Communist China in the early 1950s. Specifically, the Dalai Lama used the funds for pro-Tibet activities like funding international support programs for Tibetan independence.

That CIA programmed saw some of the Cold War’s biggest successes for the USA in terms of acquiring Chinese military intelligence, much of which was gathered by Tibetan independence fighters in the period.

Granted, the Dalai Lama wasn’t directly involved in street combat or spy infiltration missions, although that would make for a great movie. But that doesn’t change the fact that, for a period, the Dalai Lama was indeed on the payroll of the CIA. Which just gets weirder the more you think about it.

How Strong Is Duct Tape?

If you know anyone who’s into DIY, you’ve probably heard some of the bold, seemingly unsubstantiated claims that get thrown around regarding duct tape. Claims like, it’s so durable and waterproof, you can "make a kayak out of it"; or even "fashion a bridge from it". But as ridiculous as those sound, they’re completely true! And they’re only the tip of the iceberg of impossible seeming uses for duct tape.

Starting small, people online have shared their ingenious methods of crafting waterproof clothing from duct tape. All that’s required is unravelling a load of the stuff into sheets to form a sort of duct tape "fabric". That can then be cut to the shape and size of the required clothes.

Then, it’s just a matter of sticking them together at the seams to form spectacularly weird, waterproof outfits. You can even use colored tape if you want to be a true fashion icon. Or make yourself a duct tape batman mask if you need a fancy dress costume in a pinch.

©rexler via Reddit

If those waterproof clothes aren’t quite enough to combat flood season, there’s another mythical seeming use for duct tape that actually works. By combining it with some trash bags, PVC pipes and some wood for a seat, it’s actually possible to craft a fully operational kayak out of duct tape!

When sealed tightly enough around a base layer of garbage bags, secured to the PVC piping, the duct tape is completely waterproof, and most importantly, the kayak floats!

But clothes and kayaks are just the beginning. Thanks to the structural strength and elasticity provided by its cotton core and plastic coating, alongside the sturdiness of its adhesive when stuck in place, duct tape can actually support the weight of a person. You can prove that in a simple way by fashioning a hammock with little more than a couple of wooden poles.

But the ultimate form of duct tape support is a duct tape bridge. That impossible seeming idea was another spectacular myth proven plausible by the kings of such things, the MythBusters. They approached the project by crafting a duct tape rope bridge, with supports and handrails constructed of duct tape woven into ultra secure, yet workably elastic ropes over a 104ft wide, 50 ft deep gap at a shipyard, to great success.

The team calculated how many strands of tape were required to support the weight of a person without major droppage, then combined strips, ten layers thick, to form the walking path. All of that was then reinforced with several layers of additional wrappings. There were even supporting strands along the sides pulled taut to prevent the bridge swaying around too much while in use.

The only parts that weren’t duct tape were the metal poles attaching it to the ground at either side! In total, the build required 200 rolls of tape, with each being around 180ft in length. To prove the contraption’s viability, the MythBusters boys, Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage, both crossed the bridge.

Though it had grown somewhat slacker, and hence wobblier by the second crossing, it was still an amazing success, and a testament to the almost mythologically useful material that is duct tape. As Jamie Hyneman himself put it, duct tape isn’t a perfect solution for anything but with some creativity, in a pinch, it’s an adequate solution for just about everything.

Breaking Glass With Human Voice

Whether you’ve seen it in movies, or just heard about it, people shattering glass with their voices is something many assume to be merely an urban legend. But, thanks to the physics behind how sound works, it’s actually possible to do.

That is because when something emits a sound, it causes the vibration of the molecules in the materials around it. The regularity with which these vibrations are emitted is known as the sound’s frequency. Thanks to certain inherent properties of matter, all objects have something known as a resonant frequency, at which the material most efficiently turns sound waves into physical movement.

For something like a wine glass, the resonant frequency is roughly the sound you’d hear if you tap the glass and let it ring out. When an object is subjected to its specific resonant frequency at a very loud volume, it can begin to vibrate to the extreme.

In fact, if the source of that sound delivers the frequency with enough power, like a voice singing very loudly, the vibration can be powerful enough to break the material it’s passing through. For glass, that means it can shatter spectacularly.

Cheese Cannonballs

In 1865, a naval battle between Brazil and Uruguay spawned a tale so crazy, that for many years, it was understandably assumed to be pure myth. In that seafaring battle, one of Uruguay’s ships reportedly ran out of cannonballs and was forced to turn to other projectiles to keep fighting.

So, they gathered up the stale cheese wheels they had onboard, popped them into the cannons and fired away. According to the story, the cheese held its shape surprisingly well, and one cheese wheel struck the enemy ship’s main sail with enough force to pierce it, rendering the ship immobile!

Cheese Canon Ball Rendered a Ship Immobile

Sounds completely ridiculous, but that crazy tale was put to the test by the MythBusters back in 2009. The crew tested a variety of cheeses of varying hardness, finding that cheeses like edam and gouda lose their structural integrity when fired from a traditional cannon.

However, harder, more elastic cheeses like Spanish garrocha proved not only capable of holding together during the launch, but actually able to break through a ship’s sail! With the myth confirmed, that raises questions as to whether cheese makers as opposed to pirates were the real terrors of the high seas!

What Animals Can Swim Up Your Toilet?

At some point, you’ve probably heard a crazy story about someone to their horror finding some kind of animal in their toilet bowl. Be it a snake, a rat, or something else entirely, those stories seem to crop up again and again, but is there any truth to them?

Unfortunately, there is! Snakes, for example, are a surprisingly common find in people’s bathrooms. They usually wriggle their way up through sewers and into the pipes of people’s homes, attracted by warmth or the scent of food.

As it’s usually only a relatively short distance from a sewage pipe to the plumbing of a ground floor toilet, the underwater journey isn’t difficult to survive. And with snakes’ naturally flexible bodies, navigating the sharp bends in toilet pipes is far from impossible, especially for smaller snakes.

Rats are similarly flexible thanks to their ribs, which are hinged at the spine. Those flexible ribcages allow them to compress their bodies into tight spaces and maneuver through the sharp bends of toilet pipes. They can also hold their breath underwater for up to three minutes, and have enough stamina to tread water for 3 days straight; so your toilet bowl is no biggie.

Water dwelling amphibians like frogs have even less trouble getting into people’s toilets, provided an opportunity; sometimes in alarming quantities! They’re often drawn to toilets as bathrooms provide the ideal, secluded, humid climate for themselves and their creepy crawly prey.

But creatures don’t always come up through the sewers. For toilet invasions that occur higher up, like one instance of a corn snake entering the toilet of someone’s 19th floor New York City apartment, the explanation may be a little different.

While it’s theoretically possible the snake might’ve been capable of slithering all the way up 19 floors of plumbing, it’s unlikely to have come from the sewers. As the type of corn snake discovered was native to Florida and South eastern U.S. states not the Bronx, where it appeared, it was most likely an escaped pet.

The snake was concluded to have escaped someone else’s home in the apartment complex, taking an aquatic misadventure through the building’s interconnected piping. Not that it makes the prospect of a high rise toilet snake any more comforting.

Motorcycling On Water

“I could totally ride my motorbike over that lake” is a line you’d probably expect to hear uttered by some overly confident drunk guy at a lakeside party, without any evidence ever surfacing to back it up. But crazy as it sounds, the societal myth of people riding motorbikes so fast that they skim across the tops of lakes may actually hold water.

As Jamie Hyneman of the MythBusters proved in 2013, it just takes a lot of speed and balls of steel. Jamie accelerated a dirt bike up to 80mph and rode it straight onto the surface of a lake, making it a full 300ft across before it sunk!

How’s something like that possible? It all comes down to weight, speed, and a smooth entry. To make it possible in the first place, the transition from ground to water also has to be extremely smooth and gradual, with no bumps, in order to minimize deceleration on entry.

Once the bike’s on the water, some complicated physics take over. As dirt bike tyres are designed to get traction in mud, that transfers surprisingly well to gaining traction in water. With the wheels spinning fast enough, the water momentarily acts somewhat like a semi solid material, allowing the bike to push itself along across the surface.

Given enough driving power, a lightweight motorbike like the one Jamie used can generate significant enough forces to counteract the water’s friction, as well as gravity for a short while.

As the water’s resistance gradually decelerates the bike, however, it eventually sinks. But even if continually riding isn’t possible, MythBusters still proved it is possible to take a short motorcycle ride on water. Not that you should, of course.

Hybrid Animals

While the phrase “scientists have created hybrid animals” sounds like something you might hear shouted on a radio conspiracy show, it’s actually not a myth at all. In 2019, Chinese scientists successfully bred monkey pig hybrids by injecting cells from cynomolgus monkeys into pig embryos.

Out of a large sample size, a handful of the embryos that developed and were born were found to have successfully integrated the monkey cells into the formation their bodies. Those primate cells reportedly accounted for between 1 in 1,000 and 1 in 10,000 cells in the piglets’ bodies, which while being seemingly small numbers officially rendered them pig monkey hybrids!

While the resulting hybrids weren’t quite as drastically alien or science fiction-y in appearance as you might hope, it’s still a big step, and possibly a glance into the future.

The ultimate aim of research like that is to breed animals that can grow entire organs of different species inside their bodies. Eventually, scientists hope that will help them figure out how to produce human organs in animals to help with the drastic lack of organ donors available to those needing transplants.

But there are non genetically modified hybrids too, which have been around much longer. Like ligers and tigons, huge, fascinating felines that’re the result of breeding lions with tigers. Ligers in particular have been bred since the late 18th century, and tend to grow larger than either of their parent species; as big as 12ft long!

©vsbattles via Fandom Wiki ©CherylRamalho via Shutterstock

Then there are grolar bears, or pizzly bears, a result of breeding between grizzly bears and polar bears. I assure you, while those may look like photoshop jobs, pizzlies are 100% real, though they’re tricky to breed in captivity, and even rarer in the wild. Ligers and Pizzlies are far from the only hybrids in our world, though.

There are zorses, or zebra horses; geeps, or goat sheep; and even camas, or camel lamas, to name but a few. With an ever increasing number of bizarre animal hybrids existing today, the ancient myths of hybridized monsters are seeming more and more like predictions of the future!

Lawnmower Blades Throw Rocks Like a Bullet

After the release of the fourth Final Destination movie in 2009, one scene spawned rumors about a previously undiscussed backyard danger. The myth that emerged was that, if lined up just right, the rapidly spinning blade underneath a mower could send a rock flying with all the deadly force of a bullet.

Sounds ridiculous, but when the MythBusters tested the theory in 2015, their results were mind mowing. The team measured the speed at which spinning lawnmower blades can fling stones, and the fastest of their results was an impressive 400 feet per second.

While that didn’t come close to the 1,000-1,400 feet per second they measured firing a .357 pistol, there’s more to lethality than just the speed of the projectile. As the rocks flung up by a mower can easily be much larger and heavier than a bullet, the damage caused could be greater even at lower speeds.

That is all thanks to a classic little physics formula that states force is equal to mass multiplied by acceleration. Using that basic principle, the MythBusters worked out that, despite much lower speeds some higher mass rocks flung by lawnmowers were actually able to deliver more force than a speeding bullet. So next time someone’s mowing, make sure to look where you’re going!

Swearing Reduces Pain

If you’ve ever stood on a Lego brick, you’ve probably also shouted an almost impressive array of swear words in response that you wouldn’t say in front of your grandma. Indeed, many people insist there’s nothing like a good bit of swearing to ease pain; but is there any truth to it?

It turns out, swearing is indeed one of humans’ most effective natural painkillers! In 2009, researchers at the Keele University tested what effect swear words had on pain management by seeing how long participants could keep their hands in containers of ice filled water.

Half of the participants were advised to say a swear word while dunking, while the rest were asked to say a neutral word instead. Those who swore were generally able to keep their hands submerged much longer than those saying neutral words.

While countless experiments have since re-confirmed the conclusion that swearing somewhat eases pain, the reasons why are still somewhat mysterious. Some experts theorize that doing something emotive like swearing may trigger the fight or flight response. That could help with by increasing levels of adrenaline, which is effective at reducing our awareness of pain.

While the research remains somewhat uncertain at the minute, there’s little doubt a few F-bombs will help the next time you stub your toe. However, that technique is not recommended for teachers, customer service assistants, or clergymen.

Male Lactation

If you thought the myths we’ve covered so far were crazy, you haven't seen anything yet. For many years, rumors have floated around society that in rare cases, it’s possible for men to produce breast milk like women can. And, shockingly, it is occasionally possible!

In fact, there’s even a phenomenon known as "witch’s milk", where new born babies, either male or female spontaneously lactate for a couple of weeks after their birth! That is caused by the hormone prolactin, which facilitates breast milk production in new mothers, and can occasionally pass from the placenta into an infant’s body.

Despite how strange it seems, that isn’t usually considered anything to worry about, and typically stops after a couple of weeks. But lactation in adult males is a whole other story. Men have relatively similar breast tissue to women, though with far fewer milk producing lobules and ducts, but lactation is still a very real possibility.

In men, that bizarre phenomenon is typically associated with a deficiency of testosterone, a hormone that regulates things like body hair growth, and the development of the male private parts. Often, that deficiency is due to an issue with the pituitary gland in the brain, or medication that affects the pituitary gland, which may also cause it to over produce prolactin.

That said, various studies suggest the mere act of a father attempting to breastfeed their baby may be enough to stimulate the production of milk. The men of the Aka tribe of central Africa, for example, have been repeatedly documented breastfeeding their children with enough success to fully nourish them!

WSU Anthropology Department

@wsuanthropology

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How do people in other societies #parent ? On the Raising #Primates podcast, Dr Barry Hewlett tells host Megan McCue what he's learned about #parenting & #egalitarian values during his 40+ years of #fieldwork with the Aka in western Africa. Hear it here: soundcloud.com/user-531085641…

2:57 PM · Sep 4, 2019

Dipping Bare Hand In Molten Lead

There are some myths in society that really leave you wondering what kind of maniac came up with them. One such so-called myth states that you can dip your hand into molten lead without being burned. Lead melts at 621 °F, or 327 °C, so firstly I have to stress: do not try that at home. But, truthfully, it is actually possible, if the person dunks their hand in water first.

The reason that is possible to do without ending up with crispy fried fingers, is thanks to something known as the Leidenfrost effect. That occurs when a liquid boils rapidly, and forms a thermal barrier of gas upon the surface it’s boiling on.

When someone dips their wet hand in lead, the principle is the same. The layer of water on the hand rapidly boils, creating a temporary barrier of gas that stops the heat of the lead reaching the skin.

Of course, if the hand remained in there much longer than a split second, it’d come out looking like well charred brisket. But, seeing as it is technically possible to dip your hand in molten lead, the myth stands confirmed. Which means there is absolutely no need for you to try it yourself!

I hope you were amazed at these surprising myths that are actually true! Thanks for reading.