There’s a lot of folklore and old wives’ tales about everyday things. In this article we will try to explore 10 urban legends that are actually scientifically approved. So here is a list of 10 Things that are Surprisingly Scientifically Proven.
10Honey
Honey does have a medicinal value in healing wounds. Because of its inability to spoil and being rich in nutrients, it creates a very good therapeutic environment for a wound. Honey is being researched for many other uses, especially because many pathogens become antibiotic resistant because of our widespread and incessant use of them. Honey is basically sugar and dries out and kills bacteria the same way salt does. There’s also small amount of peroxide in the honey. Peroxide and sugar act together to cause bacterial death as well as providing nutrients for cellular repair of the host.
9Heartburn during pregnancy
There is a long held common belief related to pregnancy. According to it women who experience a lot of heartburn give birth to newborns with a lot of hair is accurate. A study done in 2006 has proven that this is true. The study proposed a shared biologic mechanism involving a dual role of pregnancy hormones in both the relaxation of the lower esophageal sphincter and the modulation of fetal hair growth.
8Vitamin C in Treating Common Cold
Studies have found that Vitamin C actually does help with colds, as long as you’re taking it before you think you’ll get sick (on planes, traveling, etc). Regular supplementation trials have shown that vitamin C reduces the duration of colds. Given the consistent effect of vitamin C on the duration and severity of colds in the regular supplementation studies, and the low cost and safety, it may be worthwhile for common cold patients to test on an individual basis whether therapeutic vitamin C is beneficial for them.
7Cat’s purr heals bones faster
Researchers have found that cat’s purr can really heal your bones. The recent study discovered that perhaps cats’ purring helps alleviate the dysplasia or osteoporotic conditions. Cats purr during both inhalation and exhalation with a consistent pattern and frequency between 25 and 150 Hertz. Various investigators have shown that sound frequencies in this range can improve bone density and promote healing.
6Intelligence
People who are less intelligent and knowledgeable tend to overestimate how smart they are and are quite confident in their knowledge while smarter people tend to underestimate their intelligence and question their own ideas more. So, if you are confident that you are smart and have the right answer to things, unless you are extremely smart, you more likely are on the stupid end of the bell curve.
5Altitude Anorexia
Altitude Anorexia is a lack or loss of appetite which results in loss of fat at high altitudes in non-acclimatized humans. A study has shown that people living closer to the sea level were 4-5 times more likely to be obese than the people who live above the sea level.
4Cursing eases pain
Swearing is such a common response to pain that there has to be an underlying reason why we do it. A study has found that people who curse after stubbing a toe have less pain than the people who utter neutral words. How swearing achieves its physical effects is unclear, but the researchers speculate that brain circuitry linked to emotion is involved. Earlier studies have shown that unlike normal language, which relies on the outer few millimeters in the left hemisphere of the brain, expletives hinge on evolutionarily ancient structures buried deep inside the right half.
3Building more roads generate more traffic
The concept is called induced demand, which is economist-speak for when increasing the supply of something (like roads) makes people want that thing even more. Though some traffic engineers made note of this phenomenon at least as early as the 1960s, it is only in recent years that social scientists have collected enough data to show how this happens pretty much every time we build new roads. These findings imply that the ways we traditionally go about trying to mitigate jams are essentially fruitless, and that we’d all be spending a lot less time in traffic if we could just be a little more rational.
A more likely explanation is what they call the fundamental law of road congestion: New roads will create new drivers, resulting in the intensity of traffic staying the same. As it turns out, we humans love moving around. And if you expand people’s ability to travel, they will do it more, living farther away from where they work and therefore being forced to drive into town. Making driving easier also means that people take more trips in the car than they otherwise would. Finally, businesses that rely on roads will swoop into cities with many of them, bringing trucking and shipments.
2Buttered toast phenomenon
The buttered toast phenomenon is the tendency of buttered toast, when it falls, to land butter-side down in the majority of instances. When toast falls out of one’s hand, it does so at an angle (simply by nature of it having slipped from its previous position of level to the ground). The toast then rotates. Given that tables are usually between two and six feet (0.7 to 2 meters), there is enough time for the toast to rotate about one-half of a turn, and thus lands upside down relative to its original position. Since the original position is usually butter-side up, the toast lands butter-side down.
However, if the table is over 10 feet (3 meters) tall, the toast will rotate a full 360 degrees, and thus land butter-side up. The added weight of the butter has no effect on the falling process, since the butter spreads throughout the slice. In any case, the weight of the butter is likely to be less than 10% of the weight of the slice of toast. Since most would be absorbed into the toast it would not significantly alter the center of gravity.
1Placebos Work
Placebo is a substance or treatment with no active therapeutic effect. Studies have proven that placebos are effective. In fact, some placebos are more effective than others, and that knowing something is a placebo doesn’t always negate the effect. It also works on a scale. Two sugar pills work better than one. A salt water injection works better than the pills. Injections seem like a bigger deal than pills so we expect them to be more effective, so our imagined relief is higher.
It does get weirder. Pacemakers will help with heart arrhythmia after they have been installed but before they’ve been turned on. Fake knee surgery works. Wheel a guy into a room, pretend to operate, he reports the knee is better. Feed a guy a stimulant, tell them it’s a tranquilizer and they fall asleep. 4 sugar pills a day will heal your ulcer faster than 2. The color of the pills matter.
If you give somebody a drug that lasts 8 hours and tell them it lasts 4, blood tests will show it clear of their system much sooner than the 8 hours it’s supposed to last. The opposite works too. Tell them it’s a 24 hour drug and they’ll still have some in their blood long past its actual 8 hours’ time.
In fact, placebos work on things even you cannot consciously control. There’s a study where rats were given water mixed with saccharin (a sweetener), and was injected with an immunosuppressive drug. White blood cell counts went down of course. Some rats got sick and died. After a while of doing this, they let the other rats recover and did it again but with just the sweetener in the water. Lo and behold, they became immunosuppressed. Rats got sick and died when given sweetener water. Source
