Visit brilliant.org/scishow/ to get started learning STEM for free. The first 200 people will get 20% off their annual premium subscription and a 30-day free trial.

Correction: Alpha wolfs are so debunked that even the guy who made the initial study debunked it with a study. Not just denounced it.

Semi-related: Whenever i hear some guy say, "Im an alpha male," or some variation thereof, my first thought is always confusion about why anyone thinks that announcing themselves as being buggy, unstable, not feature complete, prone to crashing, and not ready for full public use is a good thing.

I’m begging you guys, PLEASE make this a regular series

Not only do wolves not have alpha's but, just like humans, they will absolutely revolt against a parent/pack leader that's too abusive if given the chance.

Based purely on the thumbnail I am going to assume you are here to tell me that there are NOT two wolves inside of me?

Periods aren't baby bits, they're baby blanket bits.

As a neonatal nurse, the Vitamin K one pisses me off more than ANYTHING else!!! I've seen too many infants literally DEVASTATED simply because some "instagram-smart" granola mother refused a simple shot. And when I say "devastated", I mean devastated. The kind of devastated that nobody should ever have to see or "live" with. It's just the the most no-brainer decision and yet more and more mothers are choosing not to. It blows my mind and hurts my soul

Not only can you not draw conclusions about wolf behavior by studying wolves in captivity, you also can't draw conclusions about human behavior by studying humans in captivity, i.e. prison. Nor should you use the behavior of prisoners as a prescriptive model for how all of society should be run. I don't think that's the kind of world you want to live in.

Using '"tweet" is OK. Twitter allows deadnaming on their platform now, so "Twitter" and "tweet" are valid terms to refer to that platform

I rescue abused high anxiety dogs. Someone tried the alpha and "beat aggression into them" acts on my GSD as a puppy. Now she's terrified of people as an adult. Not gunshots, thunder, or new experiences either, *just* people. Thankfully 5 years later and she at least approaches people who avoid eye contact and keep a low profile for butt scratches and she's an absolute snuggler with me and my family.

I only feel the wifi sickness when I'm on social media.

everything about the period blood tweet is so funny. "im not against periods but" like someone was going to accuse them of opposing it like its something women just chose to do?? 😭

The vitamin K myth is the worst. My mother is a midwife and has dealt with some people like this. New mothers are often anxious and concerned for the babies health and sometimes buy into crazy conspiracies like this. Misinformation spread about medical interventions proven to save lives are disgusting and lead to deaths.

Here is a persistent myth that I think has even cropped up in a SciShow video: that mantis shrimp can see some brilliant array of colours unknown to humans, because they have 12+ types of colour cones, and humans have a mere 3. They (likely) can't. In fact, they're not very good at distinguishing colours. This was tested *more than a decade ago.* Probably what's going on is that humans' colour cones overlap to form a spectrum, and mantis shrimp cones are instead more specialized to alert to their specific frequencies faster. *(edit)* They can see different types of polarized light, though. Mantis shrimp vision is neat, and I would encourage you to look it up! Colour _variety_ just isn't what's neat about it.

The idea that a period contains baby bits is such an unbelievably ridiculous failure of not just reproductive education, but also logic.

The "more CO2 equals more plants" myth is trivial to show false: if the CO2 was the limiting factor, *the levels would not rise* in the first place. Instead, more plants and algae etc. would grow, and consume all the new CO2 down to the level at which lack of CO2 limits their growth. We kinda know what limits algae growth, and it's not CO2.

Don't mind me, I'm just here to watch people defend bad science in comments.

I wonder if the "period blood contains baby parts" person had heard about the high rates of "chemical pregnancy", where you basically just have a really early miscarriage, and frequently didn't know you were pregnant. Because the aftermath of a very early miscarriage looks pretty much the same as regular menstruation they may have added one and one and gotten three. (Or, more likely, someone up the misinformation chain had done so.)

I've grown up around a bunch of guys that can't even _hear_ about _anything_ related to periods without getting _extremely_ uncomfortable and cutting the convo off. It's refreshing to see a man talk about it without doing that. Thank you!

On the sea level rise issue: I have found some folks just didn't know the difference between glaciers and ice bergs and would use the terms interchangeably, and once that confusion was cleared up, they got on board.

I like how the period blood person was like "How do you act like this is normal?!" to literally one of the body's normal functions. Like regardless of what's in it or how you feel about it, it's normal by virtue of its existence? Such a weird take lol

Also, photosynthesis efficiency decreases as temperature rises, because Rubisco is less eager to grab CO2 when it's warm, and not everyone is a C4 chad maize

YES, YES, YES! Please do more of these because the rest of the Internet is contributing to lower test scores and outright lies.

Do one about the gut microbiome and how we don't understand nearly as much about it as wellness influencers want to pretend we do.

The "who would have guessed?" response describes literally everything I teach my clients. Dog training is remakably simple, but that doesn't mean easy.

I enjoyed Mythbusters "back in the day." I'm glad that SciShow is here to bust more myths that have surfaced.

If SciShow started a bad science debunking channel or just a channel to counter misinformation, I'd subscribe right away and watch every week!

It's kinda hilarious. I'm a wolf lover and even I took until a surprisingly recent time frame before I was able to learn the truth about the Alpha myth. Not helped by circles such as Wolf RP and Furry both still clinging and contributing to its perpetuation, and the fact that dominance/submissive behaviors are still observed in wild packs. The big thing here is that in that case it's just a conflict resolution. The "submissive" wolf is literally just going "Okay, you win" to defuse an argument. People can barely even tell the diffference between a yawning wolf and a snarling wolf, let alone the difference between (rough!) play, an "argument", and an actual fight. Honorable mention to the Omega myth. This also came from the same flawed study as the Alpha myth. The actual "rank" that we called Omega is better called a Jester. Their role is just to play. They're the family's pressure relief. When everyone else is stressed out because, say, a hunt went south, this member may come out of nowhere and start pouncing on wolves, wrestling, and bouncing around and generally being a clown to try to cheer their family back up. There are documented cases where the "Omega" wolf died, which sent the entire pack into a week-long depression. Howling mournfully, refusing to eat, and just laying around. As I noted above though, people struggle to identify the difference between rough play, arguments, and fights, though this wolf's attempts to play may be refuted by a grumpy sibling. Although I probably shouldn't even call it a "rank". It's more of just a particularly playful wolf among the pack. And no, it doesn't have to be a yearling or growing pup, frequently a playful adult will fill this role. Footnote: Full scale fights basically never happen between members of a healthy pack. Play? Definitely. Arguments? For sure. Actual fights? Almost never. The most common cause of a fight between wolves is between packs, over territory. Which I shouldn't downplay - the most lethal thing to a wolf in Yellowstone is a wolf in Yellowstone. It's fun watching the arguments relating to the colloquial "Alpha male" in context to humans down here in the comments. That whole thing has long ago transcended canids. Oh, and was flawed from the start as an oversimplification of complex factors in human personality. Of course, some humans really are simple minded enough to let a single label define their entire existence, and then either deliberately or subconsciously, alter their behavior to comply with that label. Doesn't matter whether that label is "Alpha Male", a political party, or a subculture.

No. 6 reminds me of the microwave scare back in the day. When my sister was diagnosised with Leukemia, some people thought it was because we had recently moved blocks away from the *new* microwave tower. Why my other sisters and I were not impacted was never explained to me...

Someone said the thing about "Wi Fi poisoning" to me and I couldn't help but stare at them for a minute. And then point out that EVERY electronic device attracts dust like crazy. Allergies are a far more likely cause of all those symptoms, my friend. Maybe dust a lil bit and take a Benadryl?

As far as bad takes that need straightening in science, I'd say you could do an entire episode solely on the dangers of correlations and how often they're mistaken as causations. This even extends well beyond just science

We just had our baby 2 days ago. They gave him the Vitamin K shot. My wife was so out of it she said oooo is that the special K? The nurse without hesitation said "Oh now I'm hungry!" Had to explain to my wife 5 minutes later why we were laughing so much xD

I paused the video as soon as I saw the measuring cup with the ice. Clearly this person failed to understand how much ice is locked up ON LAND. *double facepalm*

3:21 a couple buddies were talking about dog training and one said, _"Sometimes, you gotta do what they wanna do."_ Every family member gets input, right?

Honestly at this point, anything that unironically calls any group of people "idiots" in all caps like one ice meme that is an automatic red flag.

In case anyone's curious re: why injections in the muscle vs in the blood matters, the tl;dr version is that it releases into the blood more slowly when it's injected into the muscle. Gives it a weaker but longer lasting effect.

It's a shame that a certain governor from South Dakota did not have access to the facts about dogs. "Foggy, irritated, dizzy, itchy, or nauseous" seems to be a requirement for running for president these days.

WRT the CO2 myth and the need for nitrogen, i think it's important to mention that the nitrogen plants need WILL NOT be coming from the air as I can see many of the conspiracy pushers saying nitrogen isn't a problem because it's ~70% of the atmosphere. Plants need to get their nitrogen from compounds in the soil, so if those compounds aren't being replenished, eg due to deforestation, then plants will also end up dying leaving even more CO2 hence exacerbating the issue.

Y’all need to do one of these a week with all the misinformation out here!

9:34 not the guy thinking women “bleed out fetuses” every month as if …. we’re in a constant state of mitosis-pregnancy….? 🤦‍♀️ the scary thing is that I’m sure he votes, too

Fearmongering about phytoestrogens in soy is also a great terrible science take worth debunking.

Can you guys look into the study that claims cardboard contains forever chemicals? I follow a bunch of scientist, including some doctors in botany who are absolutely screaming that gardeners need to stop sheet mulching with cardboard because there are forever chemicals in the cardboard. But the study they are quoting is not about gardening, or even strictly about cardboard. It was a study on the use of mixed paper on a chicken farm. I haven't had time to dive into this myself, but if you guys could do a video on it that would clarify things for a lot of gardeners other than myself. Love you all! Keep up the good work!

Well, "snip it in the bud" is a new one for my collection of eggcorns. It's "nip it in the bud", Hank! 😅

"Applying that outdated Alpha logic to your own personal dog pack isn't just flawed, it can do some real harm." Such as killing your 14 month-old dog for being "untrainable"?

I also laugh at people who worry about the radiation from cell phones. They have clearly never lived in places like Hawaii or Florida. You get a way bigger dose of radiation just by taking your hat off when the sun is high in the sky.

Not only raising water levels, but quick melting and all that sudden fresh water in salt water wreaks havoc on ecosystems

Thank you so much for including "alpha theory" in this 🤩🤩🤩 Our dogs deserve better!

The cold myth is probably because if your head gets cold it has the most severe effects. As long as you're swimming fast enough most people can last in almost freezing water for at least a few minutes, but if you put your head under it causes instant disorientation and shock.

Morbidly, I have to wonder how many parents who reject the Vitamin K shot for their babies also push forced circumcision on them. There's just no bleeding out quite like unnecessary genital surgery.

I'm pretty sure Sci-Show has already addressed this, but I think it needs to be addressed frequently: The Double-Slit Experient does NOT prove that consciousness collapses the waveform of the particle going through the slits. It's the interaction between the particle and whatever is being emitted by the detectors that causes the waveform to collapse. There's A LOT of woo-wooo shenaneganry going around about this and it kind of drives me crazy.

An oft overlooked aspect of the Alpha wolf myth: dogs also aren't wolves.

Vitamin K is a hill I will die on. I work in a hospital lab. I have never felt such fear as I did when I ran a infants coagulation study. Poor baby couldn't clot and needed to!!

I am only commenting to say I enjoy videos like this! I think topics like essential oils (as a means of curing disease or improving health through topical application or ingestion), acupuncture, and chiropractic care (as a means to cure disease or achieve more than temporary effects) are all good topics! For a more light-hearted topic, those dog buttons that let them "speak"

@SciShow : A myth I would love scishow to debunk is that everybody should eat more protein. I see high protein diets touted as healthy all over the internet, but my understanding from studying food chemistry at university is that on average, people already eat way too much protein and it's unhealthy. My lecturer said that if you eat too much protein, some of it makes it through the small bowel undigested, so the bacteria in your colon break down the left-over amino acids into carcinogenic by-products! Why are health blogs always telling people to eat more and more protein if it gives you cancer? The thing modern people are actually lacking in their diets is complex carbs/fibre, and yet I also see influencers claiming that healthy foods like oats are bad for you just because they're high in "carbs". Carbs are not all equal, bruh

oh my god PLEASE make this a series. misinfo, conspiracy theories, so rampant these days. it'd be so helpful to have these bite sized videos to send to people who believe them

8:58 Well, Wi-Fi does cause all those symptoms for a lot of people, but because it gives them access to social media, which they will continue to spend a majority of their day on

I have lung issues and have really had success wearing my old cloth Covid masks in the cold. They’re thin enough to breathe through easily but thick enough to trap a lot of heat.

The heat thing was coming from toddlers afaik. And it makes more sense there, as their heads are proportionally bigger than an adults noggin. The Alpha Wolf thing came from observation of a pack of wolves in a zoo and it applies there and only there. When the same guy, years later, had the opportunity to observe a pack, or rather family of wolves in the wild he realized his mistake.

This episode really helps make the case for critical thinking, media literacy, and research focused courses.

Another common myth is that when you throw sodium in water it is the hydrogen that explodes. Yeah, the hydrogen will burn off as it's created, but that's not why sodium explodes in water. You can completely submerge a chunk of sodium where there is no oxygen for the hydrogen to react with, and it will still explode. You can also do this in an inert atmosphere and it will still explode. It's a coulomb explosion, not a hydrogen explosion.

I would love to see more specific debunking videos. For instance debunking chemtrails and the bad science "evidence" for it.

It's always interesting when people still think Alpha dogs are a thing. Its wild what we learn over time!

I see people try and claim that an alpha is just a good leader and that people dont know what an alpha really is, and these people really dont realise they are perpetuating confusion and misinformation with miscommunication. An "alpha" is not the same as a elected "leader" or the same as a "parent" figure, an "alpha" is an individual that gains social power through fighting for dominance over that position. Its an incredibly uncommon and rare social hierarchy in nature. Most highly social animals use an elected leader, as in the leader is an individual that can be trusted to protect and feed the group, usually consisting of older individuals with more experience and strength for defence, or they have parental leaders, as in they simly are a group consisting of the parents and their offspring. "Parent" "leader" and "alpha" are not completely interchangeable terms when talking about social structure in animals, lest it cause confusion. So please, stop lying trying to rewrite what "alpha" means, because we already have words for leaders that dont lead with fear and dominance.

thank you for talking about "alpha" dogs. it makes me sick to my stomach to see people still supporting it today

You absolutely, positively, need to do more mythbusting videos. People are DYING.

About the k-vitamin shot. I just find it frustrating that it’s even a thing people opt out of. I don’t have medical training but I like to read about facts and make my own opinion. So when I was pregnant k-vitamin was something I read about critically, which concluded in me landings firmly on the notion that there was no way I would skip that for our kid. Iirc it was something around 4 infants each year who died of brain bleedings before they started giving everyone k-vitamin shots (note I live in a smaller country in north Europe). It was something like some babies couldn’t absorb k-vitamins given orally (combined they don’t have the microbe to produce it themselves when born) which explains why k-vitamins where given as a shot, as you don’t know which babies would be affected by this bleeding beforehand and wouldn’t benefit from a oral dose. And neither a normal birth or breastfeeding offer any protection from it occurring. It’s just random and if the bleedings starts your kind of screwed. Yet this mom groups just keep sticking their head in the sand and claim their normal birth and exclusive breastfeeding protected them from the risk, and the anecdotal “evidence” of all moms in the group who forego the shot and could report their baby didn’t have any bleeding after their unmediated natural birth etc. It’s that normal adults on mass can’t differentiate between anecdotal attests and the statistical risks a large medical study describes. It’s like they can’t fathom that what the studies prove is it’s rare, random but detrimental for the few affected. That those studies also describe how the majority didn’t suffer those consequences, so just anecdotally having 100 mom in a Facebook group describing they weren’t affected doesn’t disprove the study of the rare consequences only spontaneously affected a handful out of a whole population. As a mom I don’t get why people are so interested in gambling with their kid’s health. For me a minuscule risk of my baby dying of bleeding is something I won’t choose over 0% risk my baby dies from that bleeding. So reading mom forums can be so incredibly depressing sometimes. Critical thinking and fact checking is good, but you can’t just read mom groups, blogs or tiktok before deciding in care decisions, all those can be a part of information collecting as long as you also read some of the studies. I mean you don’t need to read the whole paper row by row if you like me lack the special medical training to fully understand, but read what the study studied, about their findings, and what they tried to prove and what they could conclude. Meta studies can be good as they aggregate a lot of studies and explains what they collectively seems to describe. Mom groups, TikTok and KZfaq can be correct, so when you read the studies they can back those claims up. It’s not all doom and gloom. You just need to use the studies to evaluate how to interpret information, like checking if things like breastfeeding or formula feeding are a protective strategy for the described risk, before deciding it is.

I recently responded to a friend who posted a meme of two different types of Quaker Instant Oatmeal claiming falsely that difference was that one was sold in the US and the other the UK (they’re both sold here, one is the simpler more expensive one with real freeze dried strawberries) and their ingredients claiming we should all be alarmed. I had to explain the American listed additives as well as the difference in food labeling laws as well as pointing out the difference in products. The main difference between them in an actual side by side comparison is the food labeling laws (the US labels all the fortifications, anti-fungal agents, anti-caking agents, and emulsifiers) and Red Dye 50 which is not allowed in the EU or UK because it’s linked to hyperactivity in children.

GMOs. If I have to explain to one more person that genetic modification doesn't involve poisoning the food supply I'm gonna have an aneurism.

It’s sad how people on tiktok just take things and roll with it without doing any research at all.

A common misconception i see in people starting to go into the gym to lose weight is that doing all these twists and sit up type exercises will burn belly fat and shred your waist but that's not how it works. In order to lose weight its as simple as doing a caloric deficit and if anything doing core workouts potentially builds muscle there which would lead to size that isnt gonna go away so long as you continue to exercise it

There are people losing their homes, communities and sacred places where they have lived for thousands of years due to rising sea level. Yet other people are still dismissing it is true...

Do more of these please. The zombies (people without brains) have taken over the internet and social media.

Finally this is gaining traction. Any person that describes themselves as, "alpha" = ignorant.

PLEASE do more debunks and bad science takes!

I really like that you didn't just debunk myths that have running rampant for decades now, like the alpha male myth, but also ones that have entered the zeitgeist particularly recently, like the misinformation surrounding seed oils.

I really love these debunk videos that you guys do. I also wish I had a list of Hank- approved science websites. I'm pretty clear the PBS related sites are good. and of course the complexly group. but who else outside that universe makes a top 10 list for you guys? I really can't get enough science content so lead me to more! thanks for what you do!

9:44 ... are they calling uterine lining and an unfertilized egg "baby bits"?

Don't forget that microwaving any kinds of food utterly kills that food's "life force", and therefore, its nutritional value...

Looking sharp Hank!

I can say with certainty that sometimes I get sick to my stomach and turning my phone off really helps. Probably not the frequency of the radiation, or the intensity. More the information contained in the patterns of the waves.

It's funny how each myth does have a grain of truth blown out of proportion. Though I also never get why people are so scared of medication anaphylaxis warnings. They're less common than peanut reactions.

"... so the uterus decides to redecorate..." 💀💀💀

Thanks guys. You don't understand how good this is. I keep telling friends and classmates about how inaccurate some things they state are (based mostly on twitter or Instagram posts). This helps me (and everyone else) to spread evidencebased science. Not twitterposts.

I was told the one about water and ice in a measuring cup by a substitute teacher when I was in the fourth grade. That was like 20 years ago. It was very convincing to my 10 year old self. It’s very stupid.

Do one about all these . . . people . . . who use urine as a health thing. Like, in their hair, on their skin, etc. And eating placenta. Barf.

Please make this a series. I think this is what we need in the world right now.

Re: *Wifi* - I know someone who gets brief minor headaches from NFC readers. It's something that they didn't understand at first and weren't looking for, took them a while to finally figure out what was causing it (it was an amiibo thing and they were super distracted by the game, so it took a while to put the pieces together). I was skeptical and tested them in a double blind experiment I set up. It happens VERY reliably when the reader is turned on to scan an amiibo. What's even more bizarre is that they can also tell when a laptop is plugged in just by touching it to feel the current running through it. In a triple blind test with a lot of reasonable controls and witnesses, they did it with 100% accuracy. Blindfolded, headphones playing music, signaled to guess each time by being tapped on the shoulder by a neutral party who was also blind folded, as many controls as possible. They just could feel the current flowing through the metal casing of the laptops MUCH more than "normal" people can.

When people say they are alpha you should ask if it’s like a furry thing

Having limited criticisms to areas I know professionally, one truth emerges. Ignorance breeds gullibility. The problem really arises when that person then presents that information as fact because they don't know the difference.

As a mom who breastfed I can tell you that breast milk is great at many things just not at providing babies with iron, vitamin k and vitamin d. There is a reason newborns get a vitamin k shot in their thigh muscle, are often prescribed vitamin d drops and that it is recommended that babies especially those that are breastfed only start stolids at 5 to 6 months.

I remember an elementary school teacher telling the class about losing so much heat through your head. I didn't think that sounded right then. I nevycared to look it up or tell anyone else that. But thanks for the confirmation!

Not exactly a Science mistake, but maybe it can fit in under "Medical Terminology": If a person suffers from Nausea, he or she feels NAUSEATED. if something (or someone) is NAUSEOUS, it, he or she CAUSES nausea.

I've recently found a video on Baking Silicon and Parchment Paper being bad. Of course it had no source.

This has to be brought up every 2 years because it won't go away

4:39 "That's juste the physics of what happens when you heat something up" It is generally the case, but not always. Water also expands when it gets colder than about 4°C (which is why ice floats), so technically it contracts when the temperature rises until it reaches 4°C.

Hank being grim reaper going door to door ending science myths.

The sea level thing is an example of a double strawman fallacy. Global warming causes sealevels to rise by thermal expansion of the ocean and by melting ice over land. But some people misinterpret this fact as "the ice caps will melt and cause sea levels to rise dramatically." Examples of absurd exaggerations of sea level rise are depicted in Waterworld and Cloud Atlas, and some ignorant people take these depictions seriously. So others will point out correctly that the vast majority of ice, the float ice, won't have any effect on sealevels. And then more educated alarmists cry "strawman" while ironically committing the strawman fallacy themselves.

I love how right after this video was an ad for EMF Cleansing and EMF Poisoning in your own home.

Deadnaming people: ❌❌❌ Deadnaming Twitter: ✅✅✅