People do not get sick from cold weather; it’s from being indoors a lot more.
This one is certainly wrong. People do get sick from cold weather; it’s called hypothermia, and dozens of people die from it every winter. Being from Minnesota, I know about this.
I think a more accurate version of that original statement would be
People get sick with ‘colds’ more often in winter, not from cold weather, but from being indoors a lot more.
And even that is only partially correct. Being indoors a lot more causes closer contact and thus more exposure to ‘cold’ germs from others; that’s how you catch ‘colds’.
[And given that most people are in the same offices or workplaces both summer & winter, I wonder if there is really any actual difference in the frequency of ‘colds’ during winter & summer. If that statement was made on SD, I’d ask for a cite.]
And all 40 are getting heartly sick of it.
Kristen
December 19, 2003, 11:20pm
23
Hitchcock was the surviving half of Siamese twins joined at the umbilical. There was only one bellybutton and it was lost along with his twin.
Are they sitting in a ashtray next to your bed?
Jimsus
December 20, 2003, 2:27am
27
Do you have a cite for this?
Also about the left-handed one, I’ve heard 13% for years. I’m a southpaw myself so people often like to say useless facts about lefties to me. This site also says 13%
Jimsus
Gllrnz
December 20, 2003, 7:30am
28
Um, Jimus? I think Kristen was joking about Hitchcock being a twin.
Thanks for the responses. I was hoping for a cite that addressed all 25 of the claims, but the bits & pieces you’ve given are interesting and useful.
I gotta throw a flag on the the ‘baby knee cap’ thing.
A little digging turned up this:
Newborns do have kneecaps, Cathy. Kneecaps form about the fourth month of fetal life. However, they don’t show up on x-ray very well because they’re not ossified, or bony. At this point in life, the kneecaps are made of a cartilaginous material. The growth centers surrounding the kneecap form late in developmental life in utero and may not appear until just before or just after the infant is born.
Remember, infants are a work in progress. The potential for linear bone growth may continue until the late teens or early twenties. Although all the precursor tissues for the major bones are present at or immediately after birth, centers of ossification (where bone is laid down) continue to develop throughout childhood and beyond. For instance, the head of the femur appears at four months, the patella, or kneecap, starts showing signs of ossification at about 3 years in females and 4-5 years of age in males. Parts of the pelvic girdle (hips) don’t appear ossified until adolescence with the tubercle of the pubis not appearing until 18-20 years of age.
Why does this progressive development happen? As usual, we don’t know. There are clues that can lead to some speculation. When raised in tissue culture, the fetal tissues in question will form as cartilage, but will not ossify into bone. It is only with the presence of weight-bearing forces (along with the presence of chemical mediators) that these tissues ossify. In an article in Scientific American in 1995, researchers suggest that the reason that biological change happens is to promote the widest spread of DNA. In an evolutionary sense, it means the individual survives to reproductive age and can have children (“spread of DNA”). If creatures spent good energy ossifying bones before they were needed to bear weight, less energy would go to other developmental processes such as bodily growth or brain development, things that in the long run would be more likely to enhance the survival of the individual.
So they’re there (sorry about that) but they haven’t entirely ossified.
