Three eyes to venture into a black hole? Seriously? (Dru!/ Creative Commons License)

We’ve had a week to recover from April Fool’s Day and, while even HowStuffWorks.com jumped on the fake news bandwagon, it’s worth looking back and seeing that, yes, some ACTUAL science news broke on April 1, 2009. Some of it was so strange that I’m just now convincing myself that these are actual articles and not something from the mind of John Hodgeman. Let’s take a quick look at a couple of them…

Chicks Can Count to Three
A friend of mine just brought this one to my attention today and, sure enough, everyone from BBC News to Discover Magazine published the news that baby chickens can count to three on April 1. Closer examination reveals that, yes, an actual study on this finding was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B (the “B” is for biology) the month before. Yes, it seems that chicks can perform very basic arithmetic, such as addition and subtraction, to keep up with objects moved around behind a screen. As far as we know, however, they’d probably still get taken in a subway shell game.

Cross the Event Horizon and Open Your Third Eye, Man
Regular trips to the pages of New Scientist can certainly imbue you with some seriously trippy knowledge, though it normally doesn’t make you feel like you just read the synopsis for a Tool video. But on April 1, NS blogger Stephen Battersby launched into a discussion about how humans would need a third eye in order to fully process their surroundings if they ventured into a black hole. Yep, the NS site offered up an image of a triclops and quite a light show in the form of an embedded video. The publication’s science editor even had to interject in the comments section to assure everyone that the story was legit and pertained to an article elsewhere on the site.

How about you guys? Run into any suspicious news last week that turned out to be true?

Learn more at HowStuffWorks.com:
How Black Holes Work
How Lying Works
Top 10 April Fools Day Pranks