Top 5 first April "scientific" discoveries

Gravitational parade of planets

On April 1, 1976, the famous British astronomer Patrick Moore told a BBC radio program about a unique cosmic phenomenon. Around 10 a.m., Pluto, according to him, was supposed to pass directly behind Jupiter. The interaction of the two celestial bodies supposedly caused a decrease in the Earth's gravity. And so it happened! At the appointed time, the BBC studio was bombarded with calls from gullible radio listeners who reported feeling a short-term weightlessness (for the sake of order, let's call this phenomenon the "Kashpirovsky effect").

Judging by the surge of concern associated with the "supermoon" on March 19 of this year (the masses expressed fears that the Moon approaching the Earth would cause earthquakes and other cataclysms), the public has not advanced much in its understanding of the laws of astrophysics over the past three decades. How can one not recall the main "threat" to the existence of humanity and the Universe itself, which some ordinary people see in the Large Hadron Collider!

Flight of the Penguin

Exactly three years ago, the BBC published a video report in the style of a mockumentary: Terry Jones, one of the members of the comedy group Monty Python, in the guise of a polar scientist, told the story of how a flock of penguins took flight when the weather turned bad and flew off in an unknown direction.

Of course, these birds are completely incapable of flying, although their method of swimming does outwardly resemble flight.

Twitter Telepathy

The April 1999 issue of Red Herring, a popular business and technology publication at the time, featured an article about a revolutionary “secret invention” at the Pentagon that allowed users to send messages up to 240 characters long via email… telepathically.

The service of exchanging short messages has become commonplace (though for some reason it does not support the telepathy function yet), and mental activity at a distance is also possible: we can communicate our thoughts to other people either verbally or in writing. Moreover, we are now able to control virtual objects and even a car - thanks to special devices based on EEG, which register electrical signals from the brain and transform them into commands.

Real dragons

In 1998, an online article about the origin of birds appeared in the journal Nature, the author of which referred to the allegedly found in the United States skeleton of a theropod (a suborder of predatory bipedal dinosaurs) Smaugia volans. This creature, as the scientist claimed, had the ability to fly. The remains of bones, some of which (neck and rib) "were regularly exposed to fire", were discovered by Randy Sepulcrave from the Museum at the University of Southern North Dakota.

Needless to say, such a university does not exist, that the surname Sepulcrave was borrowed from a character in a fantasy novel by the English writer Mervyn Peake, and that the name of the new species itself comes from the name Smaug, the name of the fantasy dragon in Tolkien's tale The Hobbit...

Opening of the Bigon

In April 1996, Discover magazine reported that French physicists (both the names and the scientific organization were fictitious) had discovered a fundamental particle of matter, the bigon. This bowling ball-sized particle (!) caused computers to explode during experiments. A video camera accidentally captured it on one of the frames: the human eye is unable to recognize it, since it exists for millionths of a second, after which it disintegrates.

The use of specific terminology and a scientific style of narration led to the fact that the newly discovered bigon (supposedly responsible for ball lightning and spontaneous human combustion) caused heated debates among readers.

In general, Albert Einstein was right when he said: “There are only two infinite things: the Universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the Universe.”