Can you really be cooler in the desert wearing black than white?

Can traffic move better when nobody takes the most important road?

Which happened first?

The extinction of woolly mammoths or the construction of the Great Pyramid.

Today we've got 14 famous and fun science findings that are about as counterintuitive as you can imagine.

And we're going to check them all out right now on Skeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.

History's weirdest science findings. Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions by knowing what's real and what's not.

Telling fact from fiction is an

immortal arms race. The purveyors of pseudoscience and pseudo-history are bound by no

constrictions, so they can say whatever they want, while those of us who do legit, diligent

research can only provide evidence for one thing at a time. And now we've got

AI to contend with, with all its hallucinations and invented false history, and a worldwide social

media network revved up and prepped to share it farther and wider than has ever been

possible before. And so, increasingly, you have to rely on skeptoid, a source that you know will do the real work

to separate the real from the unreal.

We're here for you.

So when many among you asked for my thoughts on scientific findings that seem to swim against the current,

I was reminded of a common trope among pseudoscientists who were frustrated that their cherished personal beliefs don't ever seem to make it into the scientific journals.

They persuade themselves that scientists are paid to learn nothing, to go through the motions of scientific testing,

but actually to never open their minds to anything other than the status quo.

That holy knowledge that big science has decreed must never be challenged.

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