1. Hostess Twinkies have and indefinite shelf life.
Twinkies have a shelf life of twenty-five days, not seven years, and certainly not fifty years. Even so, twenty-five days is an unusually long time for a baked product to stay fresh. The secret to Twinkies' longevity is their lack of dairy ingredients: because dairy products are not part of the formula, Twinkies spoil much more slowly than other bakery items. (Source)
2. Multiplying your dog's age by seven will produce its equivalent in human years.
Come to think of it, I have never thought twice about whether this would be an accurate thing or not. Turns out, it isn't. Here is why:
Since knowledge and experience take time and effort to acquire, we've developed simple shortcuts to help us answer these questions, such as the well-known formula for "dog years": multiply your dog's age by seven, and you'll have his equivalent age in human terms. Although this formula might work roughly well for the middle years of a dog's life, it's too simplistic to accurately reflect a dog's developmental status closer to either end of its lifespan. Using this calculation, for example, an 18-month-old dog would be at a developmental stage similar to a 10-year-old child's, but while many 18-month-old dogs are fully grown and capable of reproducing, few 10-year-old children are. The "dog years" measurement tells us that a 15-year-old dog is supposed to be the equivalent of a 105-year-old person, but (factoring out accidents and other unnatural causes of death) a much larger proportion of dogs lives to age 15 than humans live to age 105.
For those who would like a rough idea of how the ages of our canine and feline friends compare to ours (strictly for entertainment purposes), we present the following charts courtesy of ANTECH. (Smaller dog breeds tend to live longer on average than larger breeds, so no single chart can adequately represent all dogs.) (Source)
3. A duck's quack doesn't echo, and nobody knows why.
Why wouldn't a duck's quack echo? What could there possibly be about the sound a duck makes that would uniquely exempt it from physical laws that apply to all other such sounds, e.g., a dog's bark, a cat's meow, or a lamb's bleat? The answer is: nothing. (Source)
4. Are red cars more expensive to insure?
The color of your car does not influence your auto insurance cost at all.
n fact, most car insurance companies don’t even ask for your car’s color.
Instead, insurance companies determine rates by looking at other risk factors like your driving history, previous claims record, where you live, and the model and age of your car. (Source)
5. Red cars are ticketed for speeding more often than vehicles of other colors.
In an attempt to prove or disprove the belief, in 1990 a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times conducted his own smallish survey of which color of cars were getting the most speeding tickets in his area. He first staked out four intersections in the two counties he was studying and made a tally by color of vehicle of the 1,198 cars that went through them. He then leafed through the most recent 924 speeding citations issued in those two counties to arrive at a count of how many had been issued to each color of car. Last, he compared the two results to see if the resultant percentages closely approximated one another or were badly out of sync.
His findings challenged the belief about red cars being dunned with proportionally more of the speeding tickets. Red cars accounted for 14 percent of the local vehicle population and about 16 percent of the citations for speeding, which is not a significant difference. (Source)
6. Eating sugar makes kids hyperactive.
While parents may be convinced that sugary drinks, sweets and chocolate make their children hyperactive at least 12 studies have shown that there is no evidence to support this belief. Yet parents are so convinced about this myth that when they think their children have been given a drink containing sugar (when it is actually sugar-free) they rate their children's behavior as more hyperactive. In fact, the difference in behavior is all in the parents' mind. (Source)
