183
votes
Accepted
Do studies show that viruses are contagious?
A qualified doctor challenging the Germ Theory of Disease after 1900? Wow.
This is just a smattering - just a random tasting - of the thousands - or perhaps millions - of studies showing that ...
- 140k
158
votes
Are 30% of human embryos "spontaneously aborted"?
Trivially true, yes. It's more commonly called Miscarriage:
Among women who know they are pregnant, the miscarriage rate is roughly 10% to 20%, while rates among all fertilisation is around 30% to ...
- 2,949
123
votes
Accepted
Is phosphine evidence of life on Venus?
TL;DR
The claimed detection of phosphine is not conclusive evidence of life on Venus; it simply indicates that there are unknown chemical pathways on the planet that are producing it. While these may ...
- 11.1k
112
votes
Accepted
Do drop bears exist?
I'm going to take a wild guess, and say the first time you heard of drop bears was from a recent Pharyngula post that mentioned them. I'm guessing a few people were introduced to the concept by that ...
- 140k
109
votes
Accepted
Are human fetal cells used to produce Pepsi?
The claims people bring to this site never fail to impress! This is more false than it is true.
Pepsi does not contain HEK-293 cells. HEK cells were used to test different kinds of sweeteners to ...
- 44.4k
89
votes
Do humans share 50% of their DNA with bananas?
Finally, a question covering my nominal area of expertise.
To answer this question meaningfully we'll need to define some concepts but first.
Yes, sort of. The statement is factually correct for ...
- 9,486
89
votes
Accepted
Does milk make your bones stronger?
A summary of recent evidence suggests:
In children with initial low calcium intake, an increase in milk/dairy intake is associated with an increase in bone density.
In adults, milk/dairy consumption ...
- 4,994
83
votes
Accepted
Russian scientist injects himself with 3.5 million-year-old bacteria, says he is now stronger and hasn't gotten ill in 2 years
The "mad scientist" seems to be Anatoli V. Brouchkov, one of the authors of Draft Genome Sequence of Bacillus cereus Strain F, Isolated from Ancient Permafrost, detailing the organism's name ...
- 44k
82
votes
Accepted
Does dyeing elephant tusks help discourage poachers?
I cannot speak to the viability of dying tusks, but it does appear that the photo cited in the question is a fake, as noted on the blog staintuskstostopelephantpoaching.wordpress.com.
Here's the ...
- 792
61
votes
Accepted
Do teenagers fall asleep and rise up later than kids or adults for biological reasons?
There does appear to be fairly solid research backing this claim.
A summary page from UCLA:
Sleep and Teens
One change in the body during puberty is closely related to how you sleep. There is a shift ...
- 741
59
votes
Accepted
Can social isolation kill babies?
We cannot be sure exactly what happened 7 centuries ago; we only have the one account. However something akin to this experiment did occur, albeit without the controlled conditions. In Romania during ...
- 15.8k
53
votes
Accepted
Is this what "happiness looks like"?
No, this is not an image of "myosin dragging a ball of endorphins". As you suspected, it is showing kinesin walking up a microtubule.
The reason the animated GIF looks uncannily similar to ...
- 140k
44
votes
Is Michelle Obama a transgender woman?
It's pretty obviously a conspiracy theory rooted in transmisogyny and racism.
Now, your question is a bit vague on what exactly the claim is. "chromosome abnormality" seems to indicate that Michelle ...
tim♦
- 51.4k
44
votes
Accepted
Is all disease caused by the electron spin of food?
The quoted text seems to refer to quantum-mechanical "spin". However "left" or "right" spin are not part of that concept, and it has nothing at all to do with the food we ...
- 15.8k
41
votes
Does dyeing elephant tusks help discourage poachers?
There is at least one organisation that dyes Rhino Tusks pink, although there are also plenty of doctored photographs of that too.
The Rhino Rescue Project has a dye which, while harmless to the ...
- 527
41
votes
Accepted
Do biological males who were castrated at birth and raised as females often behave like stereotypical men?
tl;dr- This claim is true. It may sound weird that some biological males are castrated and then raised as though they were female, however it's been done to address a birth defect where genitals ...
- 4,111
38
votes
Accepted
Is slime mold eaten in Mexico as a dish called "feces of the moon"?
Enteridium lycoperdon, a slime mold, is consumed by certain populations in Mexico and has the common name "caca de luna." Fuligo septica, another slime mold, is also consumed in Mexico.
(...
- 14.1k
36
votes
Does science define life as "beginning at conception"?
Interestingly there's a survey: "Biologists' Consensus on 'When Life Begins'", 2018 of US biologists on this (the choice of profession/experts was motivated by a pre-survey of the US population at ...
- 57.1k
35
votes
Accepted
Is this Indonesian man, Mbah Gotho, 145 years old, as he claims?
The claims are nothing of any significance. Qouting (and translating) from the story Kenalkan Mbah Gotho, Kakek 146 Tahun dari Sragen:
Lantaran bukti-bukti fisik yang menunjukkan kapan dirinya ...
- 5,221
35
votes
Are 30% of human embryos "spontaneously aborted"?
For those pregnancies that have already lasted 5 weeks, recent research sets an upper limit on the American public's cumulative "spontaneous abortion" of 22%, presenting the rate as a range from 11% ...
- 2,883
34
votes
Accepted
Is this comparison of wedge tailed eagles and bald eagles accurate?
American Bald Eagle - Haliaeetus leucocephalus
Claim #1: One of the smallest Eagles in the world.
False
Length of the American Bald Eagle is 94-106 cm (this is in the length range of 85 - 106 cm for ...
- 22.7k
33
votes
Is there a point of no return when starving to death?
tl;dr: Yes, there is a point at which recovery is not possible without significant medical intervention.
Death by starvation is not simply a matter of running out of energy to sustain life, so cannot ...
- 852
31
votes
Do humans share 50% of their DNA with bananas?
The claim that we share 50% of our DNA is likely a misquote of an older claim, that we share 50% of our genes with bananas. Both claims, as best I can tell, are false. I'll address each claim in turn.
...
- 846
28
votes
Accepted
Did a boy die after masturbating 42 times?
Snopes did a fact check and found that a recent variant of this story, set in Detroit - which they say was derived from the older Brazilian version - was false.
They questioned how anyone knew the ...
- 406
28
votes
Russian scientist injects himself with 3.5 million-year-old bacteria, says he is now stronger and hasn't gotten ill in 2 years
The one verifiable claim (assuming Mr. Brouchkov is not lying) made in the article is:
Anatoli Brouchkov, head of the Geocryology Department at Moscow State University, says he has not had flu for ...
- 388
26
votes
Accepted
Did hundreds of birds die in a park the Netherlands? What caused it?
Seems to be true about a large number of suddenly dead birds. There are some articles in Dutch media reporting this. However the cause has not been determined and there is no mention of 5G antennas ...
- 4,658
25
votes
Accepted
Does rolled sod produce 40x as much oxygen as a pine forest?
As the top answer to this related question states, plants in general are oxygen neutral. In other words, whatever oxygen is emitted today will be emitted as CO2 later. So what really matters from a ...
- 7,194
25
votes
Accepted
Does it take two weeks for a single man to produce enough sperm to impregnate every fertile woman on Earth?
Theoretically that is rough-ballpark-correct. But that is assuming that you would need only one sperm per woman, which is unrealistic.
Using the... erm... "normal" way, not every sperm finds its way ...
- 19k
25
votes
Accepted
Does the AstraZeneca vaccine not come in contact with any animal product during production?
In the European Assessment Report for the AstraZeneca, they make that statement more specifically:
The applicant also confirmed that no material of human or animal origin are used in the growth ...
- 1,934
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible