24 Long-Held Scientific Assertions That Were Recently Proven False

‘All that junk DNA? It does stuff. Turns out we need it’
24 Long-Held Scientific Assertions That Were Recently Proven False

You know how every six months, it seems like a new study comes out saying some seemingly healthy food causes cancer and something we thought is unhealthy actually prevents heart disease? It’s because, as inconvenient as it is, part of moving forward scientifically is revising knowledge. In fact, if you got the info from scientists themselves, they’d probably add a lot more qualifiers than a news site headline looking to terrify you.

The problem is, sometimes it’s hard to get the correction to stick. Especially if it’s inherently lame, like when we found out that the T. rex was probably covered in feathers. This can make what are genuinely huge scientific discoveries go, well, popularly undiscovered. 

Thankfully, Redditors have provided us with a list of some of the biggest scientific about-faces of the past 10 years that are actually pretty cool.

StrebLab e 10mo ago Edited 10mo ago A draining lymphatic system of the brain was discovered in just ~2016. Before that it was thought that there was no lymphatic system in the brain. Wild that we are still discovering major systems of human anatomy this recently.
waifuraya . 10mo ago the appendix is a useless organ. for years, it was thought to be a vestigial structure with no function, but research in the past decade has shown that it plays a role in our immune system and maintaining gut bacteria
ChadGPT420 10mo ago Edited 10mo ago ASEN This one was 2012, but close enough. The University of Michigan came out with a study about how sweat glands impact the healing of wounds like scrapes, burns, etc. it was believed for a long time that new skin cells were created from the edge of the wound using the undamaged ones, but they found that sweat glands help secrete the new skin cells, and that they are coming up from the wound itself. It's why your hands might get really clammy if you've just scraped them up.
. 10mo ago flamespond Neptune isn't dark blue
surfkaboom 10mo ago Boar are becoming MORE radioactive in the Chernobyl area due to their digging and foraging. The deer are becoming less radioactive due to their eating at/above the surface. The boar are digging down far enough to hit isotopes from Russian nuclear weapons testing.
BeneficialTrash6 10mo ago You have eyelashes. Living in your eyelash pores are mites. It was believed for the longest time that these mites did not have anuses and did not defecate. They would simply grow and grow, until they filled with too much poop and simply popped. In the last ten years it has been discovered that, no, these mites do in fact have anuses. This is important work.
LaniusCruiser 10mo ago Turns out our connective tissue isn't just a bunch of thick collagen holding our organs in place. It's a bunch of interconnected sacs of fluid dubbed the interstitium. Yeah basically, in order to see our organs on microscopic level, we would cut them open into thin slices, use chemicals to help fix the tissues together (basically preserving it) and then place these slices in between slides of glass. This process caused the fluid to drain out of these sacs and collapse, so the reason we never saw them before is that we have been accidentally destroying them
Scrotote . 10mo ago Garter snakes are venomous. Doesn't quite count because it was discovered in the early 2000s.
Paleonthology and paleoantropology have made HUGE steps forward in the last decade thanks to the introduction of ancient DNA sequencing alongside the good old fossil records. As far as I know, we have been debunking several things that we thought were set in stone, also proving the existance of the Denisova men and that they interbred quite frequently with Neanderthals and Sapiens. DNA studies also allowed us to give much clearer light to human evolution and geographic distributions.
10mo ago EroticPubicHair The monoamine theory of depression (The theory that imbalances in things like dopamine, serotonin, GABA, etc.) as the primary cause of depression. The prevailing theory now I believe is more related to how large amounts of stress physically damage certain areas of the brain. This can cause individuals who are vulnerable or have predisposition to develop depression, or other mental disorders.
DixieCretinSeaman 10mo ago A longstanding conjecture in particle physics - supersymmetry - seems increasingly iffy based on the lack of evidence from the large hadron collider. My understanding is that there are still some versions of it that are possible at even higher energies, but it was a big surprise that no new particles showed up so far. If you don't know about supersymmetry, you might have heard of string theory, which builds even further on supersymmetry. So string theory is also at risk of being experimentally disproven.
Doogie2K . 10mo ago | mentioned this in another thread, but the idea that sugar is more to blame for heart disease and other nutrition-related maladies than fat is recent, thanks in part to lobbying_by. the sugar industry ruining careers in the process.
MarkHoff1967 10mo ago The food Pyramid. They basically flipped it upside down a while back, rendering what we'd been taught for decades as utterly wrong.
Illustrious-Lynx-942 . 10mo ago All that junk DNA? It does stuff. Turns out we need it.
DakPanther 10mo ago This is more around 10-15 years ago but paleoanthropological work and comparative anatomists found data that suggest humans never had a knuckle walking ancestor. It seems that the other great apes independently developed their mechanisms for knuckle walking independently from each other and we actually began developing our bipedalism early on from an arboreal ape-like ancestor that didn't yet have any specialized ground travel methods.
SmackEh a 10mo ago Most dinosaurs having had feathers is kind of a big one. Considering they all are depicted as big (featherless) lizards. The big lizard look is so ingrained in society that we just sort of decided to ignore it.
tadleonard 10mo ago For the longest time it was thought that plants could only absorb simple, small ions like nitrates at their root tips. But, TL;DR: plants (1) eat whole single celled microbes with their roots and (2) they attract them and foster a healthy population of microbes by releasing sugars and carbs into the soil (3) this happens in a cycle, so plants are constantly fattening up microbes, partly eating them, and releasing them back into the soil to start the process over again. Basically, plants farm microbes as we farm them.
n3u7r1n0 10mo ago All my life the Milky Way was 'about 100k light years across'. Some years ago | think within 10 maybe, they started saying maybe it's twice that size. Big math has big errors I guess
10mo ago metarinka The crisis in cosmology is less than 10 years old. Basically we had a theory about how the universe formed and how old galaxies were from observations from Hubble and other telescopes. When the James Web space telescope came online it could look WAYYY further, and it found galaxies that shouldn't exist... then it found more and more and more. Basically our two ways of dating galaxies no longer agree with each other and that disagreement keeps getting larger and larger and no one knows who is right (or more likely both are wrong). Good video primer
10mo ago darkwulf1 Nature VS nurture, or at the least it's more refined. Your DNA has several potential codes that may not be used in your lifetime because they have to be triggered with environmental events. Food, abuse, challenges, trauma, all of those can trigger parts of your DNA over long term events, resulting in a change of personality such as anxiety, depression, or antisocial personality disorder. And everyone has different genomes so the same traumas can result in different personality disorders.
HurricanePK 10mo ago That applying ice is actually the worst thing you can do to heal an injury, as the high blood flow from the inflammation is your body's natural way of healing the injury and slowing it down is just hurting your body's ability to heal itself. The only benefit ice has is numbing the pain.
Tutorbin76 . 10mo ago Edited 10mo ago Water evaporation only being caused by heat. With the surprisingly recent confirmation of the photomolecular effect we now know light can make water evaporate faster than with heat alone. This has massive implications for our understanding of cloud formation and other weather patterns, and could lead to engineering low energy drying and desalination solutions.
medicated_in_PHL 10mo ago Edited 10mo ago Your fingertips do not wrinkle in water because they absorb water. Your fingertips wrinkle in water because we have an evolutionary adaptation where our nervous system realizes our fingers are in water and the nerves engage to wrinkle your fingertips so that you have better grip underwater.
spderweb . 10mo ago Keeping peanuts away from infants for a couple years of age to prevent allergies. Turns out, doing this is the reason there are so many peanut allergies now. They changed the rule about 7 years ago.

Tags:

Scroll down for the next article

Must Read

VIRAL ON CRACKED

A WEEKLY
NEWSLETTER OF
JOKES + TRIVIA

Forgot Password?