9 'Amazing Facts' That Are Totally Untrue

7. You Can Bite Through Your Finger Like A Carrot

The full "amazing fact" is usually something along the lines of "Did you know that you could bite through your own finger as easily a carrot, but your brain stops you".

This is usually followed by about 10 seconds of people tentatively biting their own fingers, having not considered the horrific consequences should they manage it.

In a study in 2012, researchers tested just how much jamming force a human finger could take. In the experiments, cadaver fingers were exposed to 1886 N of force in 200 different jam positions and were described as experiencing "fractures" rather than being sheared off. This is dramatically more than the force required to bite through a raw carrot, which is around 200 N.

The best you can hope for is probably a partial amputation.

Those scientists were investigating the shearing power of electric car windows, but there was one (albeit, unconfirmed) case of a couple biting each other's fingers off in lieu of the more traditional wedding ring. Despite even those levels of crazy, the pair were actually unable to bite all the way through, resorting instead to cutting through the rest "in the normal way".