Mr. Flint's Classroom

Not. This one is really good. The myth goes that birds will eat the rice and they will blow up. First off, rice is a staple of the diet of many bird species. Secondly, they simply won't blow up. The premise to this myth is that rice swells when it absorbs water but the total volume of the water and rice remains about the same. The real reason that people shouldn't throw rice at weddings is that rice acts like little rollers causing people to slip and fall on it - kind of like throwing marbles at weddings.

Some people insist that people throw bird seed instead. This is just as arbitrary as throwing pretty much anything. I guess the bird seed must have something to do with the misconception. Bird seed will only attract more pigeons, encouraging them to do their duty all over the wedding party and their limos.

The elephant is the only mammal that cannot jump. Yeah, and I've got a bridge to sell you too.

Sure. Whatever. Have you ever seen a hippopotomus jump? How about a three toed sloth - they jump really well too, huh? What exactly is jumping? If it means that an animal leaps from the ground then someone must have seen a beached whale propel itself off the ground. The fact is that many mammals cannot jump. Bad myth.

Nonsmokers lead a healthier lifestyle and live an average of 6.7 years longer than their smoking counterparts. Cigarettes contain nicotene which is a very dangerous poison. It is amazing how people get defensive about their right to smoke!

Every year in the tobacco producing areas of the world, some workers come down with Green Tobacco Sickness. The disease is caused by absorption of large amounts of nicotine through the skin. The problem occurs most frequently when the tobacco leaves are wet, causing the nicotine to dissolve. The symptoms include weakness, dizziness, vomiting, cramps, headaches, and respiratory problems.

Taste buds for particular flavors are not located in different locations on your tongue

Not only would it not kill a person, it would be unlikely if it could even cut your head open. Read all about it here.

Magnetic bracelets, copper bracelets, and magnetic insoles certainly cannot reduce pain.

Unless... you fall for these kind of "snake oil" treatments. I suppose that people feel better by shelling out hard earned cash for these worthless devices. Ever heard of a placebo? The fact of the matter is that it is most certainly a psychological effect that people have by wearing these devices. Read about magnetic bracelets and insoles here.

Here's how it goes: Pigs and cows are slaughtered for their meat. The rest goes to the hot dog factory. The leftovers from hot dog factory go to Spam factory. The leftovers from the Spam factory go to the Jell-O factory. Well, that's not quite how it works but gelatin is made by rendering (boiling in water) animal skin, bone, ligament, and tendon. Gelatin is most commonly made from beef remants and is actually protein from these structures. Agar is another type of gelatin that is used in biological and medical laboratories for growing bacterial and other cultures. Agar is derived from seaweed. Read more here.

Parker Brothers has been selling Ouija boards for decades with great success. It works like a charm, doesn't it? Take a hunk of wood and put some letters and numbers on it, include another little hunk of wood, slap it in a box, and sell it for an outstanding markup. An awesome profit is made. Works great - almost as good as tarot cards! Read more here.

This has nothing to do with science but is a very funny event...Well, at least for some people. If you owe no money or the IRS owes you money then there is no deadline for filing taxes. Even returns mailed a day or two late will not usually induce a penalty. Read more here.

Have you ever seen a lightning strike in the distance, but didn't hear a thunderclap? You may have heard someone call this phenomenon "heat lightning." Apparently, the belief is that somehow this lightning isn't caused by a thunderstorm, but simply occurs on hot summer days. Not surprisingly, this theory isn't correct. Heat lightning is simply a bolt that is occurring in a storm far enough away that you can see it but not hear it. Generally this distance is at least 15 miles. Sound travels at the rate of about five miles per second in the atmosphere; so if you do see lightning and can hear the thunder, you can estimate the distance to the storm by counting the number of seconds separating the two and dividing by five. Think about it logically - this phenomena is most pronounced after dark when it is markedly cooler.

This actually is a rather difficult problem for scientists to deal with. All other things being equal, a sample of cold water will obviously freeze sooner than a sample of hot water. There are many factors that play a role here. For a full discussion click here.

Toilets and sinks do not drain clockwise in the northern and counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere.

People will not get sucked out of an airplane if a hole is shot in the fuselage and other movie tricks.

It wouldn't be exciting if an in-air gun battle didn't include a bullet hole through the fuselage. The movie industry somehow invented the phenomena whereby the contents of the airplane are sucked out the side of the aircraft. Total invention. Oh yeah, when shot you will not fly back about two meters before hitting the ground.

This is one of the biggest myths of all time. As children we are brainwashed into thinking that red, blue and yellow are the primary colors when, in fact, they are not. Pick up any dictionary and you will find that red, blue, and green are the primary colors. A misprint? No way!

In fact, the primary colors (secondary pigments) are red, blue, and green while the secondary colors (primary pigments) are cyan, magenta, and yellow. Here are three experiments to try:

Popular opinion thinks that it is hot in the summer because the Earth is closest to the sun during June, July, and August. Seems like a reasonable conclusion, doesn't it? Well... when it is summer in North America it is winter in Australia and other locations south of the equator. The fact of the matter is that Earth is actually closer to the sun in our winter months but that is fairly inconsequential to our climate. The real reason that it is warm in the summer is because the length of the day is longer and the sun's rays strike the Earth's surface at closer to a right angle.

O.K. sure. They'll also stand on end any other day of the year. Try it today! Read more here.

Your parents told you that when you were little so that they could see the T.V.! Read more here.

In the heyday of covered bridges road crews had to spread snow on the bridge in the winter so that sleighs could traverse it. So why are they covered? Read more here.

It doesn't matter which side you put "out" when baking a potato in aluminum foil.

The new millenium did not start on January 1, 2000

Here's another good marketing idea: we'll go ahead and print a ton of t-shirts and get the press all riled up to believe that the new millenium starts

You may have heard that a person's hair and nails continue to grow after they die. This is actually just an illusion. As the body begins to dehydrate and shrivel, the nails extend further beyond the tip of the fingers. Similarly, the skin of the face shrinks, and this makes the hair appear longer. None of the physiological processes which cause cells to grow can continue more than briefly after death, because without the circulation of blood, the nutrients are not available for the necessary metabolism.

Taste buds for particular flavors are not located in different locations on your tongue

Did you know that your tongue is not the only place you have taste buds? These sensitive receptors can also be found on your lips, cheeks, and the roof of your mouth. The bumps on your tongue are not all taste buds, either. They are called papillae, and they come in four different types: filiform (narrow cylinders, with no taste buds), fungiform (mushroom shaped), circumvallate (large and round), and foliate (furrowed, rare in humans; their taste buds work only in newborns). Children have about 10,000 taste buds; however, some of them die as you grow older. Senior citizens may have as few as 5,000. A common misconception is that there are particular places on the tongue that are more sensitive to different flavors.

No, not Xenon the warrior princess, xenon the element. Xenon is one of the noble gasses, like helium, neon, and argon. Xenon's symbol is Xe, its atomic number is 54, and it has an atomic weight of 131.29. Although it's present in our atmosphere, its concentrations are below one part per million.

For commercial production, xenon is extracted by liquefying air at low temperature and high pressure, and then separating the xenon from other components. Its main use is in various types of lights, including some automobile headlamps, stroboscopes, and as an exciter in some laser applications. There are some interesting photos online that demonstrate how a xenon lamp's high color temperature makes it easier to pick out road markings. Click here to view the photos.

Ordinary glass is made of molten sand, limestone, and soda ash. But the German team of Otto Schott, Karl Zeiss (of lens making fame), and Ernst Abbe discovered in the 1880s that if you added boron oxide to the mixture, you end up with a dramatically different material. Pyrex, as borosilicate glass came to be known, was first marketed by Corning as the ovenproof casserole dishes we all know and love. Pyrex is indispensable as laboratory glassware because it is much stronger than normal glass and can tolerate rapid changes in heat without shattering. John Emsley, author of "Molecules At An Exhibition," suggests that the Romans may have actually invented borosilicate glass as far back at 37 AD.

Arachidonic acid is a type of fatty acid that is necessary for the development of the human brain; it's normally supplied to a baby through its mother's milk. Once an infant develops the proper enzymes, the baby can manufacture arachidonic acid from linoleic acid, which is found in many food sources, including animal fats, peanuts, and sunflower oil. Premature infants, however, must have direct supplementation of arachidonic acid, and there is as increasing body of research that suggests adding it to regular infant formula would be a good idea as well. Arachidonic acid is only one of many very important nutrients that infants are supposed to get from breast milk. Feeding a child with artificial formula deprives children of some of these nutrients.

You may have heard that a television displays video at a rate of 30 frames per second. That is almost true, but not quite. The actual rate is 29.97 frames per second. This may not seem like much of a difference, but it adds up to 3.6 seconds an hour, and almost a minute and a half a day, which is pretty darn important if you are running a TV station. Because it is so much more convenient to think of 30 frames per second, most video equipment simply operates as if that were the case. A system called "drop frame" makes up the difference. Contrary to the name, no actual frames are dropped; they are just numbered differently. At every minute of video, except those divisible by ten, the numbering system skips two frames. Much like a leap year, this compensation effectively corrects for the difference in rates.

The mathematical definition of "N factorial," where N is a positive integer, is the number you obtain by multiplying together all of the integers between 1 and N. For example, 3 factorial = 1 * 2 * 3 = 6. The notation for factorials is the number followed by an exclamation point, for example 3! = 6. Factorials grow very rapidly: 4! = 24, 5! = 120, 6! = 720, 7! = 5,040, 8! = 40,320, and by the time you get to 14!, the result is over 87 billion.

Factorials have many important practical applications in the theory of probability. For example, if there are 10 people in a room, the number of different groups of 3 that you can put together is equal to 10! / (3! * (10-3)!), which works out to 120 possibilities. (This formula is called "N choose r," where N is this case is 10, and r is 3.)

The basic bright white sparks of fireworks come from the burning of metallic dusts such as magnesium, iron, aluminum, or steel. There are only a handful of chemicals that are used to produce the colors that you see in a typical Fourth of July (in the United States) display. The reds come from strontium compounds, yellow from sodium, orange from calcium chloride, green from barium, and blue from copper.

All of these compounds are extremely chemically reactive, so they cannot simply be stuffed into a rocket and left sitting around waiting to be lit. Instead, various proprietary compositions are formed into pellets that react when heated to form the compounds needed for the various colors. An excellent and more detailed treatment of this subject can be found here.

Did you ever wonder why the surface of the yolk of a hardboiled egg is usually green? This phenomenon is caused by a reaction of sulfur and iron, and is more likely to occur if the water contains large amounts of iron. According to the American Egg Board, the greenish color is harmless, if a trifle unappealing The best way to keep your yolks yellow is to avoid cooking them for longer than is necessary to hardboil them, and then cool them rapidly, so the reaction doesn't have time to take place.

A tractor trailer that is going around a curve is more likely to slide off the road when full than when empty. False

A kicked football will travel the furthest distance when kicked at a 33 1/3° angle above the horizontal. False

Sailboats move the fastest when they are traveling in the same direction as the wind. False

Eighty percent of ultraviolet rays make it through the clouds on an overcast day. True

You would receive a higher dose of radiation from living near a coal power plant than near a nuclear power plant. True

The first controlled nuclear reaction took place in an old squash cour under the grandstands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. True

Toilets empty clockwise in the northern hemisphere and counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere. False

An automobile engine uses more energy to cool itself than it does to make the car move. True

If a car could travel at the speed of light and turns its lights on then will it help the driver see the road ahead any better? Yes.

Would you weigh more in a mine 1/2 mile below sea level or in Williamsport? Williamsport

Which would cause more injury to a person driving a car… hitting an immovable brick wall at 50 mph or hitting a car of the same mass and same speed head on at 50 mph? Neither

Which direction does a compass point at the North Pole? Whichever way you are looking.

If you are in an elevator whose cable breaks, should you jump when the elevator is about to hit the bottom of the elevator shaft? No way!

Walking on hot coals and lying on a Bed of Nails is mystic and/or spiritual and requires special training.