TEN MYTHS YOU ALWAYS THOUGHT WERE TRUE

Mount Everest – Is It The Tallest Of Them All?

Mount Everest is one whopping big mountain, but is it the tallest in the world? In fact it is not. 

A mountain is highest in regard to how far it soars above sea level. But technically it is tallest from base to summit. And Mauna Kea kills it at being the tallest.

Everest is only 29,029 feet (8,848 meters) above sea level, with none of it below sea level.

Above sea level, Mauna Kea (in Hawaii) is only 13,799 feet (4,206 meters). But when you count the enormous portion of it that's underwater, it's 33,465 feet tall (10,200 meters).

Mother Birds Will Abandon Babies if You Touch Them

If a baby bird is floundering around on the ground, looking like it's desperate to get in the air, but it can't despite all its efforts, don't fret about not moving it away from a cat ready to pounce.

Baby birds usually don't leave the nest until they're ready to fly. But that doesn't mean the fledgling's parents aren't supervising their offspring. They're probably in a nearby tree, watching them.

As for the scent issue – birds just don't smell too well. A few species are an exception, but chances are vastly greater that the little chirping ball of fluff won't suffer if you need to move it to the other side of the fence from where your dog plays.

Deoxygenated Blood Is Blue

Everybody has veins snaking up and down their bodies, and those veins are blue. So it stands to reason that deoxygenated blood that courses through those veins is, as a matter of course, blue.

But it is not true. Blood is always red, bright or a darker red. The veins are blue thanks to a trick of the light, not the color of what's inside them.

Lightning never strikes the same place twice

False. Lightning can strike the same place twice even during the same storm. The Empire State building gets struck at least 20 times a year according to different sources. 

Fully Draining the Battery on Your Smartphone or Laptop Helps Condition It

This used to be true for older nickel- cadmium and nickel-metal hydride rechargeable cells. However, this is not true for lithium-ion or lithium-ion polymer cells. You can recharge a lithium-ion polymer battery whenever convenient, without requiring a full charge or discharge cycle.

Constant “deep cycles” — a complete drain of your battery — “is rough on any battery and can decrease performance over time. Using the battery is the best thing for it.”

Regardless of how you use it, your laptop or smartphone battery should retain near full potency for around 2 to 3 years.

Ostriches Bury Their Heads In The Sand When They're Scared Or Threatened.

Ostriches don't bury their heads in the sand—they wouldn't be able to breathe!

But they do dig holes in the dirt to use as nests for their eggs. Several times a day, a bird puts her head in the hole and turns the eggs. So it really does look like the birds are burying their heads in the sand!

A Camera With More Megapixels is Better

Perhaps no tech myth is as gleefully perpetuated — or at least intimated — by digital camera-makers that somehow more megapixels equal a better digital photo.

Megapixels have absolutely nothing do with digital photo quality, only digital photo size. The quality of a digital camera photo is determined by a camera’s sensor type and size, its processor and its optics. The only impact the number of megapixels makes is in the quality of a zoomed-in image snapped by a smartphone. 

A 16-MP digital camera with a larger image sensor will give you better images than a 20-MP model with a smaller sensor.

The Government Can Track Your Cellphone Even When It’s Off

None of the websites repeating this paranoid belief cite a single concrete, documented case of phone-off tracking for one good reason: It’s impossible.

 “Any signal requires power to transmit. There is a product to track phones … BUT this is only possible if the phone is powered.” The one exception is if you’ve unintentionally installed a piece of malware — a Trojan horse used to control and/or monitor the device . 

A temporary solution is to remove the battery; a more permanent solution is installing an anti-virus app on your phone. But the bottom line is “no power equals no electronics can work.”

Touching a frog or toad will give you warts.

Many frogs and toads have bumps on their skin that look like warts. Some people think the bumps are contagious.

 "Warts are caused by a human virus, not frogs or toads. But the wart like bumps behind a toad's ears can be dangerous. These parotoid glands contain a nasty poison that irritates the mouths of some predators and often the skin of humans.

So toads may not cause warts, but they can cause other nasties. It's best not to handle these critters—warts and all!

The Great Wall of China Is the Only Man-made Object Visible from Space

The Great Wall Of China gets a double whammy on this myth. You can see other man-made objects from space (especially when the part of the Earth being viewed is awash in the artificially illuminated glow of nighttime).Cities light up like spiderwebs at night, of course, but even during the day lots of stuff is visible.

Bridges, dams, airports and major highways are among the structures seen by spacemen as they shoot across the sky. It's also pretty hard to pick out the Great Wall of China from any space-based locale because built from rocks of the same colour as the landscape. So unless China decides to give the wall a makeover and paint it hot pink, it's going to remain fairly hard to spot from space.