22 Established Science "Facts" That Were Recently Refuted

‘Neptune isn't dark blue’
22 Established Science "Facts" That Were Recently Refuted
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Not to get all “climate change denial” on you, but “trusting the science” is a delicate proposition. The fact of the matter is that science is not always our friend. Science has perpetrated atrocities, and atrocities have been perpetrated in the name of science. Of course, that's not science’s fault. We should believe in facts even if the process by which those facts were ascertained has been abused more than a communal Fleshlight.

Except sometimes, those “facts” turn out not to be true. Science is an imperfect, well, science, and as technology and technique improves, we often find out that what was previously believed is totally wrong. The four humors, anyone? That's why one Reddit user asked r/AskReddit, “What long-held (scientific) assertions were refuted only within the last 10 years?”

Smackmybitchup007 . 1y ago Scientists CAN actually make a snail forget stuff. Read it the other day. What a time to be alive.
flamespond 1y ago Neptune isn't dark blue
Illustrious-Lynx-942 . 1y ago All that junk DNA? It does stuff. Turns out we need it.
Open-Year2903 1y ago Eating eggs doesn't raise serum cholesterol in the body. Egg white fad is going away
Kushali . 1y ago Brontosaurus is not the same as Apatosaurus. For decades people thought they were the same. But they aren't.
Scrotote . 1y ago Garter snakes are venomous. Doesn't quite count because it was discovered in the early 2000s.
IWasSayingBoourner . 1y ago Things like depression are no longer pinned on chemical imbalance. The hunt for a true mechanism continues.
MarkHoff1967 1y ago The food Pyramid. They basically flipped it upside down a while back, rendering what we'd been taught for decades as utterly wrong.
1y ago In a grand round I listened to last year I learned that the theory that aluminum causes Alzheimer's and dementia had been disproven and now the focus is on pesticides.
n3u7r1n0 . 1y ago All my life the Milky Way was 'about 100k light years across'. Some years ago I think within 10 maybe, they started saying maybe it's twice that size. Big math has big errors I guess
saucysaggie . 1y ago Part of the original definition for microbe was that it was stuff we couldn't see with the naked eye. Then Thiomargarita magnifica gets discovered which can be a whole centimeter long. Wild!
StrebLab 1y ago . Edited 1y 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.
surfkaboom 1y 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.
grizz281 . 1y ago . Edited 1y ago Not really a refutation, but I always thought the re- definition of a kilogram was pretty cool. Instead of relying on physical items to define a kilogram, all of which diverged in mass anyway, scientists developed a watt balance, so that a kilogram would be dependent on physical constants. I think they also changed the definition of a coulomb (?) by some fractionally small amount.
Tutorbin76 . 1y ago . Edited 1y 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.
DixieCretinSeaman 1y 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.
ChadGPT420 . 1y ago . Edited 1y ago ACT 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.
LaniusCruiser 1y 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
. 1y ago Ophthalmological research has changed what we thought we knew about vision and neuroplasticity. Many conditions previously thought permanent after early adolescence are now treatable in adults through vision therapy programs. This includes the correction of accommodative and convergence anomalies, amblyopia, strabismus, visual changes following CVA, etc. Individuals who have suppression are now able to turn on their suppressed eye and achieve stereopsis. It's a wild time in the field of ophthalmology.
DakPanther 1y 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. I'd imagine it somewhat resembled a gibbon's shamble.
waifuraya . 1y 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
spderweb . 1 1y 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.

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