Slavery is one of the worst atrocities the United States has ever seen. It’s mortifying to know that Americans behaved that way toward other humans, but at least it’s over … ish. The accurate history of abolition isn’t widely known. For example, and contrary to popular belief, slavery didn’t end in the United States with President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. According to PBS, the proclamation did free slaves … in Confederate-controlled states. The Union states were still allowed to keep slaves mostly because Lincoln didn’t want to offend them and add more allies to the bank of dissenters. Pretty messed up, huh?

Don’t worry: Slavery was mostly ended with the passing of the 13th Amendment in 1865, as noted by The Atlantic, which outlawed both slavery and involuntary servitude in all forms, minus a giant, gaping loophole that’s still taken advantage of today. According to the language used in the amendment, involuntary servitude is still allowed as long as it’s punishment for a crime, and we’ve seen this tradition live on through prison labor. Many historians blame the loophole for the booming prison industry in the United States, one that disproportionately incarcerates Black Americans. Chain gangs might be a thing of the past, but prisoners forced to work under threat of punishment is still very much a reality in this country, despite the work of modern abolitionists.

Similar to beginning a sentence with a conjunction, most of us were warned that ending a sentence with a preposition is an improper use of the English language, and there were plenty of red marks on our essays to back it up. It’s probably best to forget most of what you learned in high school English class, though. Once you get to college, you’ll have all of most of those rules ripped apart by a rabid TA with delusions of grandeur, anyway.

Language changes based on how it’s used in everyday speech, and as we’ve seen with internet lingo, it can change overnight. There was certainly a time when ending a sentence with “to,” “for,” “of,” or “with” would’ve made you sound like uneducated street rabble, but that time has long since passed. According to Grammarly, it’s perfectly fine to end sentences with prepositions; it’s simply an informal use of the language. You’ll find it in virtually all written and spoken media because if you go around throwing out too many “of which”s or “to which”s, you’ll sound like a pompous Victorian hipster with very few friends.

One night in 1752, United States Founding Father Benjamin Franklin decided it was a brilliant idea to take a key, a bit of string, and a kite and sail them through the tumultuous air of a thunderstorm. We might categorize this type of behavior as “certifiably insane” nowadays, but Franklin was on a scientific mission he likely didn’t know would go down in mythic history as the discovery of electricity. Shockingly, this famed experiment didn’t lead to the discovery of electricity at all, despite what teachers have wrongly claimed for years.

Electricity wasn’t exactly a new concept in Franklin’s time. The world had known about it for centuries, even if they didn’t yet know how to utilize it. According to Universe Today, the ancient Greeks ran experiments with static electricity. Ancient clay pots containing iron rods and copper cylinders were found in Baghdad in the 1940s, as the BBC notes, and they appear to have been early batteries, suggesting that parts of the world may have been able to harness electricity before others knew it existed.

Franklin’s experiment served its purpose, though. The Founding Father wasn’t setting out to discover electricity but instead demonstrate the electrical nature of lightning, which the experiment did perfectly.

“Put your hat on before you go out for recess,” our teachers would scold. “You lose most of your body heat through your head.” None of us thought to refute it. Granted, we were young, but it made sense with everything else we were taught about heat movement. After all, heat rises, right? Well, not exactly. Heat excites air molecules and causes them to rise, but the heat itself radiates, which doesn’t have much pertinence to the biological thermodynamics of the head. Unless, of course, your head is filled with hot air.

According to The Guardian, the whole “losing more heat through your head” thing is nothing more than a popular myth that likely cemented itself into society through a 1970s survival manual published for the U.S. Army. It claimed, in one line, that you lose “40 to 45 percent of body heat” from an uncovered head, and from there, the myth spread like an inconsequential disease that hat manufacturers are thankful for. As a lucky break for hatless children everywhere, two researchers at Indiana University published a study on medical myths in 2008 and totally debunked this lie. Now, they do say you’re more likely to notice cold temperatures on your head and face because of the plethora of nerve endings in the area, so you’ll likely be more comfortable wearing a hat in winter, but it’s not a health crisis if you don’t.

Some of the lies we learned in school were simple informational blunders, while others seem to be more benevolent falsities. Those white lies, whether believed or not, serve a purpose. For example, we have a famous and false anecdote about Albert Einstein. The great physics master and formulator of the theory of relativity was supposedly a poor student in high school who performed so badly in math that he actually failed the subject. Of course, this never happened. 

The truth, according to The Washington Post, is that Einstein was a fantastic student who excelled from a young age in just about every subject he studied. The only known time where this maestro of relativity failed was during his first crack at taking the entrance exam for Zurich Polytechnic, and he only failed because the exam was in French, a language he wasn’t very familiar with.

Regardless of whether or not Einstein actually failed math doesn’t affect the usefulness of the myth. Though it may lose teachers some perceived integrity later in a student’s life, the anecdote tells children that even if they fail now, they can succeed later on in life. It’s heartwarming and encouraging.

Bats’ abilities to perceive the world around them are superpowers compared to humans’ limited sensory capabilities. Their big ears capture reflected squeaks and clicks to paint a detailed sonic map that allows them to avoid obstacles and catch meddlesome mosquitos. Sonar is pretty useful when you’re nocturnal, especially if we’re to believe that bats are blind, which has been wrongfully taught in schools everywhere for as long as most of us can remember. The myth has pervaded society deeply enough to give rise to phrases such as “blind as a bat,” but idioms don’t have the power to make falsities true.

In all actuality, bats don’t just have super hearing; they also have super light-dark vision, which National Geographic says is three times better than human vision. According to the United States Geological Survey, bats can see — yes, with their eyes — in conditions humans consider “pitch black.” This is really the only type of vision they need, and it’s also the only vision of theirs that’s any good. It’s a perfect adaptation to their nocturnal evolution. But what bats gain in light-dark vision, they lose in color sharpness. So, bats won’t likely be painting million-dollar mosaics anytime soon, but they can see well enough to keep from getting tangled in your hair.

Your mothers, grandmothers, and, of course, your teachers probably warned you about spending too much time out in the cold, especially if it was both cold and wet, because you’ll catch a cold from being cold. Of course, that’s not how any of this works. There’s a kernel of truth in the lie, but we’ll get to that in a second. The common cold is usually caused by a rhinovirus or a similar culprit, and the human body can’t make a virus out of exposure to winter weather. According to Winchester Hospital, viral infections are more common during winter months for a plethora of reasons that have nothing to do with your body temperature. Low humidity allows viruses to live longer outside of a host, people spend more time in poorly ventilated indoor environments, the protective mucus inside of your throat and sinuses becomes dryer and more easily infected, and so on.

Now, here’s the kernel of truth, as Discover Magazine explains: Lowered body temperature wreaks havoc on the immune system and makes one more susceptible to infectious disease. So where winter weather isn’t going to give you a virus by itself, it still has real consequences on the human body if you don’t dress properly for outside temps, but the only health issues you’re likely to find as a direct result of those cold temperatures are frostbite and hypothermia.

Despite what Edison-heads may want you to believe, Thomas Edison didn’t actually invent the light bulb. According to Science Focus, the first known person to successfully light up a filament with electricity was an English chemist by the name of Humphrey Davy around the turn of the 19th century. He ran current through a high-resistance wire and — poof! — there was light, but his design was nothing more than fancy science fair project. There was no way his thick wire would’ve been efficient on an industrial scale. Cue Warren de La Rue, another British chemist, who took the wire idea but made it of a thin, high-endurance metal and stuffed it into vacuumed glass, creating a light bulb almost 40 years before Edison. La Rue’s bulb, like Davy’s, would never be produced on a large scale, mostly because the filament was made of platinum.

As they say, the best lies contain a grain of truth, and this particular fib is no exception to that rule. Thomas Edison didn’t invent the light bulb, but he did create the best light bulb of his time. Edison’s design used a thin carbon filament and better vacuum than La Rue’s design, providing the bulb with both longevity and commercial producibility. He may not have been the first person to invent the light bulb, but Edison’s company is the reason we have electric lighting in our homes, even if his design is growing rapidly obsolete since the introduction of LEDs.

When you visit the zoo, one order of animals stands out above the rest: the primates. They look suspiciously like us. They have hands, faces, and demeanors that remind us of our favorite uncle or our nose-picking, poop-slinging best friend. (You have one of those, right?) And why shouldn’t they? We are, after all, hairless great apes. We just happen to stand straighter, and some of us are smarter than our tree-climbing cousins. You were probably told in school, as most of us were, that we evolved from apes like the gorilla or the chimpanzee, but that’s not really how evolution works.

About 6 million years ago, according to the Smithsonian, protohumans and apes set off on divergent evolutionary paths. We have yet to find any physical evidence of a single common ancestor, but based on genetic evidence, there should be one trapped in the fossil record somewhere. What scientists can see from tracing back our evolutionary history, though we only know bits and pieces, confirms that this ancestor was indeed “apelike.” So where the claim about humans evolving from apes is partially true, it’s widely misunderstood. Humans and the other modern apes share a common primate ancestor that was neither human nor anything like modern apes. Until we find the “missing link,” it’ll be impossible to say for sure if this creature was an ape or some sort of proto-ape deserving of its own classification. So, don’t take to the trees just yet.