Urban Myth Busters.

[TwickenhamCyclist]

If you eat sprouts then you'll get curly hair.

nonsense - everyone knows its burnt toast that that makes your hair curly

 

[stephec]

nonsense - everyone knows its burnt toast that that makes your hair curly

I was told it was the crust on bread that gives you curly hair.

 

[TwickenhamCyclist]

I was told it was the crust on bread that gives you curly hair.

That's easy to disprove - the queen doesn't eat crusts and she has curly hair - it must be all he burnt toast she eats...

 

[Peteaud]

Too many eggs and you will be egg bound.

 

[TwickenhamCyclist]

[QUOTE 3243795, member: 45"]There's all kinds of argument both ways on the Internet. But simply, your body wants to keep you at your normal core temperature. If you drink a hot drink your temperature will rise and your body will bring it back down. So it feels like you're cooling down but you're only getting back to square one.[/QUOTE]
It could also be related to the Mpemba effect - hot water freezing quicker than cold (for which I think there are still competing explanations)

 

[PeteXXX]

Women only need men when they can't get the top off a new jar of marmalade...

 

[swee'pea99]

If you eat sprouts then you'll get curly hair.

Eating carrots helps you see in the dark. (They used to feed 'em to second world war pilots for that very reason you know.)

 

[stephec]

Women only need men when they can't get the top off a new jar of marmalade...

Or a spider out of the bath.

 

[ufkacbln]

[QUOTE 3243736, member: 45"]My mom used to say that a cup of tea is the best drink to cool you down.[/QUOTE]

Tea is a warm drink and totally unsuitable for slaking the thirst of a working man

A recording by Willie Rushden, but I can't remember the author

 

[MontyVeda]

wearing a helmet promotes premature hair loss.

 

[MontyVeda]

[QUOTE 3244741, member: 259"]Lycra increases testosterone levels.[/QUOTE]
as does premature hair loss... according to Ross Kemp

 

[Leaway2]

Doing too much of something makes you go blind apparently...

Can you use a bigger font please?

 

[vernon]

It could also be related to the Mpemba effect - hot water freezing quicker than cold (for which I think there are still competing explanations)

It's definitely not related to the Mpemba effect. The cooling effect of tea is allegedly a biological response to the imbibing of a hot drink in a hot climate. The Mpemba effect is a yet to be a universally accepted physical phenomenon explained by a universally accepted set of physical processes.

I was familiar with the Mpemba effect before Mpemba discovered it but only just. He observed the effect in 1963 and I received my warning in 1962.

My grandmother wouldn't let me put out warm water for the birds in winter telling me that it would freeze faster than cold water and deprive the birds of a drink sooner than giving them cold water would. I accepted her assertion without further thought or challenge, after all, grannies are never wrong are they? Time and lots of experiments performed by others suggests that her assertions were correct.

I never thought about the Mpemba effect again until I was doing a PGCE in 1983 and was idly leafing through some Association of Science Education magazines in Leeds University's Centre for Science Education. I'm still not curious enough to perform any experiments to investigate the effect. They'd be as exciting as watching paint dry and even less exciting than the series of experiments that I performed as a combustion engineering undergraduate to determine the minimum air flow required to maintain combustion in metallurgical grade coke that had been doped with a range of copper salts.

I wonder how and/or where my granny acquired the knowledge.

 

[TwickenhamCyclist]

Thanks @vernon - very informative. Must admit I came across it teaching KS1&2 as well - and can confirm it is about an exciting investigation as watching paint dry...

 

[vernon]

Thanks @vernon - very informative. Must admit I came across it teaching KS1&2 as well - and can confirm it is about an exciting investigation as watching paint dry...

Try determining the critical air blast of copper doped metallurgical coke - three weeks of:

• Prepare coke sample by crushing it and using sieves to extract a specified particle size range
• Place weighed sample into an ignition tube
• Ignite coke sample
• Wait until uniform combustion is taking place across the entire sample
• Reduce air flow to a set value for five minutes
• Increase airflow to original value
• Determine if combustion is still taking place - the coke 're-ignites'

If combustion is still taking place:
Repeat the process with a reduced post uniform combustion until re-ignition no longer takes place
Repeat the experiment three times with the post uniform combustion air flow that no longer supports combustion

Repeat the above with a different %copper present to determine a new critical air blast.

Once the range of copper content has been exhausted, repeat using a different copper salt for doping.