To be a myth once a cold is there vitamin c. Has no effect on. Reading and dimly lighted harms the eyes. Fortunately not its just tiring it could lead to headaches if the eyes can relax overnight theyre fit again the next morning. Cherries and water together cause tummy ache that may have been correct in the past microbes in on clean Drinking Water coupled with the fruit could have triggered unpleasant fermentation processes in the stomach and guts but improvements in Water Quality mean that this isnt generally a problem any more. So what about the miraculous power of spinach the green leafy vegetable became famous thanks to popeye several generations of children were made to consume large quantities of the stuff it would make them a strong as the comic strips ala write. The rule university in both is welcoming young guests today your rights to. From a nearby high school. They want to examine spinach more closely theyre testing the iron content of the vege in the lab. The spinach project was dreamed up by Katherine Sama professor of chemistry didactics. And. Shes interested in how chemistry can be taught in an engaging manner. Maybe these students will go on to become scientists themselves one day. Katherine zama is convinced that examples from peoples everyday lives are helpful like popeye. I used to love what you know popeye and my parents made me to spend it before i was allowed to watch the show. And when he ate the spinach he got huge muscles he was a role model whenever i ate spinach i imagine becoming strong its. Just me but the notion that theres a lot of iron in spinach is just a myth. Scientists themselves created this myth because sometimes they to make mistakes and for mooted it probably came about due to a transcription error in the lab a scientist forgot a decimal point as a result three point five milligrams became thirty five nutritionist really picked up on that the recommendation was eat a lot of spinach itll make you strong. But there wasnt just one mistake quite by chance a chemist in basel found thirty five milligrams of iron in dried spinach powder. After the transcription error an error of logic because the fresh hydrated vegetable only has a tenth of this sign content the myth was born. To commit him. But the misunderstanding was cleared up decades ago and yet were still left with the feeling that spinach is a miracle vege. Indium fire in this case weve taken the myth that spillage makes you strong so we can sensitize the student to the idea you dont have to just accept such assertions you can question them. And there are even methods by which you can question it. As part of this student lab project were doing scientific testing to dispel myths. The students have incinerated the spinach and dissolved it in hydrochloric acid the coloration reveals how much iron the solution contains. The result spinach is merely average when it comes to iron content. Wheat bran and pumpkin seeds for example contain far more. But myths werent just created in the past the present is also able to generate new myths. Can mobile phones cause planes to crash. Enders and his colleagues at the German Aerospace center in braunschweig are investigating this potentially life or death question. The aircrafts electronic heartbeats in the fuselage. Test engineer Thomas Heineken performs a final check before todays experiment can begin. The test plane is an airbus a three twenty one of the best selling aircraft for short and medium haul flight. Can cellphones really cause their tried and tested technology to seize up. This question has preoccupied us since the first mobile phones came out in the eightys. Fears of electromagnetic radiation were and still are considerable. Shelling only seven but i remember having an electronic alarm clock that my phone interfere with when this possibility was transferred to the context of flying where safety is the top priority and it was a sensible idea to be really restrictive about phones at first for fear it could be dangerous but today we can say that weve gone too far. As a child good for. Thats why our him end as wants to test the aircrafts ability to withstand electromagnetic radiation. How much phone radiation can the on board system cope with. The systems for navigation and communication are particularly sensitive yes. But not sufficient to vision and a special antenna is going to measure the electromagnetic waves. This plane can take more than one hundred fifty passengers for this experiment the scientists have only invited a few test subjects but the data can be extrapolated from a fully occupied plane. Mobile telephony and Aviation Technology have adapted to each other cell phone radiation is lower than it was thirty years ago and aircraft are better protected. You always have to bear in mind that lightning bolts strike airplanes directly so that planes fly through radar waves sometimes very close to the source and the airplane has to withstand that and his task of. Compared to those threat levels the radiation coming from a phone is ridiculously low. What about hospitals why are there still signs banning the use of mobile phones. Often the radios in the Nurses Office cause much more interference than the modern phones visitors have. Nowadays almost all medical devices have shielding to protect them from electromagnetic interference so phones dont cause a problem at all. That. This has been the official position since two thousand and fourteen for planes to the European AviationSafety Agency decided that passengers dont have to put their phones into flight mode anymore but each individual airline has the last word. Or fewer movies field. Of unknowns. One phone cant interfere with the technology on board an aircraft but in reality there are hundreds of passengers on a plane and many of them are carrying several Electronic Devices such as laptops smartphones and the readers. Are him endas can measure this combined radiation but its very very weak. We ask again can a lot of Electronic Devices a lot of active mobile phones collectively endanger the safety of an aircraft. Definitive the answer is definitely no its not even so much about phones. Deliberately send out strong signals and mobile phones also contain microprocessors Tiny Computers that can emit electromagnetic radiation interference including in the frequencies used by planes. But the signals are so weak theyre insignificant. During takeoff and landing phones should nevertheless remain switched off in the event of an emergency passengers shouldnt be distracted and the devices can cause crackling in the line between the pilot in the tower but thats all. Myths often arise from fear parents are particularly at risk. Mozarts music makes children more intelligent even before theyre born. That was the claim of u. S. Scientists twenty five years ago. Follow up studies werent able to corroborate the effect listening to music has many positive effects but becoming more intelligent isnt one of them. Reading to children is also said to improve childrens Intelligence Studies have shown that frequent reading to children particularly in Early Childhood makes them somewhat more successful in school but scientists are convinced that intelligence originates more from d. N. A. Than from the parents behavior. Its different with this myth just let babies cry it out. Thats not harmful that strengthens their lungs it is said. But in truth infants cant see themselves they need their parents care. Scientific myths arent just created through mistakes or uncertainty the media are involved too. Zany a past works at the institute of Mass Communication and Media Research in zurich she researches how scientific insights are presented in the media Climate Change for example to this day certain groups continue to deny manmade Climate Change they describe it as a lie a hoax a myth in this way selfproclaimed climate experts managed to bring well founded scientific insights into disrepute reports about the socalled myth of Climate Change are particularly popular in the United States paradoxically one reason for the distorted patroller facts is the professional ethos of those in the media. In the west. Especially journalists in the United States tries so hard to be objective that when they give air time to an opinion or position they also give a voice to the counter position that means that french positions are given a much stronger or disproportionate weight in the debate. And british archivist. A common. View is mightnt realise that an overwhelming ninety seven percent of all climate scientists are agreed Global Warming is down to human activity. In. Xenia past has been analyzing the relationship between climate scientists in the media for years. One of her findings is that the scientists are scared that the Study Results could be hijacked and misrepresented in public. Controversy in the us to claim we were able to say that climate scientists had greater objections to publications when the finding suggested that Climate Change was progressing more slowly. They were worried that this finding could be instrumental ised by Interest Groups to say that manmade Climate Change was a myth and it was all a lie i knew to us constantly and gotten danus gonna skipped. Posts advice communicate science openly and objectively without exception. Theres nothing more scientists can do to prevent new myths Everything Else is in the hands of the media their readers and viewers. March two thousand and fifteen people who eat chocolate lose weight more quickly this headline in germanys mass circulation builds newspaper created as. Publications and broadcasters around the world reported on the new miracle diet from germany. In the Chocolate Museum in cologne we learn whats really behind this incredible study. Or rather to. The on a global. X. A filmmaker seen here with museum confectioner i got moolah deliberately engaged in some pseudo science she just invented the chocolate diet. Deanna lobel is a Television Journalist her idea was to test the gullibility of her colleagues to do that she needed a headline nobody could resist slim through chocolate. Together with her coauthor peter on a can she managed to expose a sick system. Our intention was to take a close look at it whats happening on the nutrition and diet market we found that the argument very often goes like this a Scientific Study says if this or that makes us healthy or sick this and that we should consume more or less of it and if you take a closer look at these studies theyre not scientifically reputed will most of the time after thats what we wanted to document in our film. All you need is a White Lab Coat and ordinary people immediately become deceptively real scientists. Diet studies tend to follow a similar pattern various groups are set up and have to adhere to different rules afterwards the scientists compare how much weight each group lost. In the case of the chocolate diet it went like this. Group a was put on a diet and was given Chocolate Group b. Was only put on a diet group c. Continued to eat as before. The on a level and peter on a can started their experiment with sixteen test subjects they were only told afterwards that theres no such thing as a chocolate diet for three weeks every candidate was weighed daily all changes were recorded. Unfortunately many disreputable studies are conducted this way the desired result is cherry picked from a large mass of different data. I mean we were a data leech we wanted to get as much information from the test subjects as possible they even had to measure their urine every day which is a completely pointless piece of data but we thought would generate as much data as possible so that we could put everything together in such a way that we could spin it and market our findings as best we could and it worked out ok. The two journalists didnt completely make up the chocolate diet idea but they twisted the data of their test subjects to fit their purpose