35 False 'Facts' That You Wrongly Believe (And 1 That You Should)

13. Coffee Is Made From Beans

Actually, believe it or not, it isn't. Coffee is made from seeds. Coffee "beans" are, in fact, the seeds of the fruit borne by the coffee plant and they start life as the pits of the coffee cherry. Coffee cherries typically contain two blue-green seeds which eventually - once roasted - become the coffee "beans" that we're familiar with. The coffee seed acquired the misnomer "bean" because at the point of extraction from the coffee cherry, they closely resemble any number of actual beans. Although coffee cherries have bitter skin, they contain extremely sweet grape-like flesh and since a fruit is generally any sweet-tasting plant product with seeds, the coffee berry and its bean-like seeds definitely fit the definition on both counts. This supports the claim that coffee "beans" are really just seeds and are not related to legumes in any way.

12. Humans Grow Warts After Touching Toads

Na-ah, wrong again. The results are in and they're about as conclusive as they could be: humans don't develop warts from touching toads. Who even knows where this myth originated! Down through history toads have been given a consistently hard time. Maybe it's because there's something inherently more nasty about a creature that looks like an obese frog with ugly colouring and scabby, warty-looking skin. Those warty-looking bits are actually a combination of mucus and poison glands - sounds charming, doesn't it? No wonder they've gotten a bad rap for so long! Toads can do a lot of funky things with that ugly skin of theirs, including ooze a nasty toxic milk when they're scared or feeling defensive. There's any number of awful things all that toxic muck can do to humans (and other animals) if it goes where it shouldn't - we might feel extreme pain, we could go into seizure, it could collapse our entire cardiac system, we might even die. But there's one thing that skin and all its gooey ooziness won't ever be able do and that's give us warts. With all those other options at its disposal, why on earth would any right-minded toad stop at 'warting' us to defend itself?