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Five Science Facts We Learnt At School That

Are Plain Wrong
October 29, 2014 | by Mark Lorch

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Lets start with a quiz

How many senses do you have?
Which of the following are magnetic: a tomato, you, paperclips?
What are the primary colours of pigments and paints?
What region of the tongue is responsible for sensing bitter tastes?
What are the states of matter?
If you answered five; paperclips; red, yellow and blue; the back of the tongue; and gas, liquid
and solid, then you would have got full marks in any school exam. But you would have been
wrong.

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Taste, touch, sight, hearing and smell dont even begin to cover the ways we sense the world.
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We sense movement via accelerometers, which are located in the vestibular system within our
ears. The movement of fluid through tiny canals deep in our ears allow use to sense
movement and give use our sense of balance. Make yourself dizzy and its this sense that you
are confusing.
When we hold our breath we sense our blood becoming acidic as carbon dioxide dissolves in it
forming carbonic acid. Not to mention senses for temperature, pain and time plus a myriad of
others that allow us to respond to the need what is going on within us and the environment
around.

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Magnetic repulsion
It is not just paperclips that are magnetic. Both tomatoes and humans interact with magnetic
fields, too.
Paperclip and other objects that contain iron, cobalt and nickle are ferromagnets, which means
that they can be attracted to magnetic fields. While the water in you and the tomato or
more accurately the nuclei in the hydrogen in the water in you and the tomato is repelled by
magnetic fields. This interaction is called diamagnetism.
But the forces involved are incredibly weak. So normally you dont notice them. That is unless
you have been in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine. In there, a massive magnet
manipulates nuclei of various atoms inside you in such a way that results in detailed images of
your inner workings.
Though you dont need to go to a hospital to see diamagnetic interactions. Just use a couple
of cherry tomatoes, a strong magnet, a wooden kebab stick and a pin:

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And the types of magnetism dont stop there, but thats for another time.
Youre painting with the wrong colour

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The true primary colours. MARKELLOS, CC BY

You were taught that primary colours are those that cant be made by mixing other coloured
pigments together, and that all other colours can by produced by blending these primary
colours. Red and blue fail on both counts. You can make red by mixing yellow with magenta.
While a blend of magenta with cyan yields blue. Meanwhile a massive range of hues are
inaccessible if you start with just red, blue and yellow.
Colour theorists had this all worked out by the end of the 19th century but for some reason it
hasnt made it to school curriculums. The proof is in your colour printer cartridges. They come
in cyan, yellow and magenta, which are the true primary colours.

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A bitter taste in your mouth

Areas 1,2,3 and 4 theres are no difference MesserWoland, CC BY

Remember those tongue maps that crop up in biology text books? They clearly show how the
taste buds for bitter sit at the back of the tongue, with sweet, sour and sweet having their own
discrete regions.
These tongue maps first appeared in 1942 after Edwin Boring of Harvard University
misinterpreted a German study from 1901. Despite Borings mistake the maps soon started to
appear in schools texts. Then in 1974 the topic was revisited and the whole idea was roundly
discredited. Nevertheless over 40 years later tongue taste maps still persist in biology text
books.
Look at the state of your screen
We all learned solids keep a constant shape because the molecules in them are ordered. These
can melt to liquids which keep a constant volume and can be poured. Liquids evaporate to
form gases that expand to take up the volume available to them. There we have the three
states of matter, end of story.
Expect of course there is more. Liquid crystals have molecules that are ordered like a solid but
are fluid like a liquid. These properties are vital for your cells, shampoo and of course liquid
crystal (LCD) flat screen devices.
But why stop at four states. There is plasma, the state of matter for most things in the sun, or
Bose-Einstein condensates, superfluids and dozens more.
Time to rewrite textbooks?
There are many more than the five facts that need to be fixed in school textbooks. I am not
suggesting that we should start teaching 6-year-olds about matter that only appears in Nobel
Prize-winning physics labs or filling the curriculum with detail on dozens of senses. But maybe
we should stop telling kids fibs.
Perhaps a biology lesson should start with: We have many senses, here are the five we are
going to learn about. Or a sentence dropped in here and there that mentions the existence of
more than three states of matter. As for the tongue map, just rip that page out of the book.

Mark Lorch does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company
or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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