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Critical Research Failure
That sound you just heard? Jesse Owens spinning in his grave.

"All right, Dr. Hassan, you've got a five-thousand-year-old scroll of indeterminate origin. Roll a Research Check and attempt to identify."
"I rolled three."
"After examining the scroll, you take a stab at its origins and declare that it appears to be Homer's handwriting. The others in the room, realizing your mistake  *, laugh you out of the scientific community."

The most glaring incarnation of Did Not Do The Research. A particular instance where — frequently during a discovery of great scientific or historical significance — the resident Mr Exposition, whose Techno Babble has been extremely convincing (and perhaps even accurate) thus far, suddenly makes some comment that is so totally off-the-scale of inaccuracy that anyone with a cursory knowledge of the subject realizes the writers made the whole thing up.

Many of these will be Disaster Movies or Action Movies and will use state of the art computer effects to keep your interest.

See also Gretzky Has The Ball (for depictions of sports that fit this) and Cowboy Bebop At His Computer (for examples of this showing up in the news). Dan Browned is a deliberate version of this, where the creator clearly made claims of accuracy, but failed to deliver on them. If you have to explain why something is an error, then it is not a Critical Research Failure. To put it bluntly: this trope is Did Not Do The Research evident to anyone with even elementary knowledge, or common sense. Example: Around 350 AD the Wulfila translated the bible into gothic. If someone claims that he did it around 400 AD this is a case of Did Not Do The Research. If however someone claims that he did 100 BC it is a Critical Research Failure.

Contrast the MST3K Mantra, which tells us not to worry about these little details.

Examples

Advertising
  • A TV spot for the film Gamer became an Internet hit when it claimed that "the last time Gerard Butler kicked this much ass was 300 years ago." Yeah, we're pretty sure 300 did not take place in the 1700s.
    • They got confused by that Robot Chicken sketch spoofing it, 1776
  • Another spot, this time for The Men Who Stare At Goats, claimed, "Clooney, McGregor, Bridges, and Spacey are... The Men Who Stare At Goats!" But only Clooney's character did any goat staring, Spacey was in charge of the project, Bridges was the project's Guru, and Mc Gregor is a reporter investigating two decades after the fact. Will somebody make Don LaFontaine's replacement at least read the movie's otherwiki page first?
    • But with a movie title phrased in the plural and with four big-name male actors to list, what is an advert supposed to do? In terms of getting a message over to an audience very quickly, this kind of fact paraphrasing is par for the course.

Anime and Manga
  • One scene in Grappler Baki involved a character who blinded people by pulling out their optic nerves... which, for some reason, involved sticking a finger into the side of his opponent's neck and pulling said nerve out. The optic nerve, which connects the eye and brain, really has no business being there...
  • Code Geass R2. Episode 8. Schneizel moves his king into check during his chess match with Lelouch/Zero. Hilarity Ensues because you're not allowed to move your king into check in Real Life. It was Hand Waved as a 'test of character'.
  • Eyeshield 21 sometimes gets the rules of American football wrong. Most glaringly however, was when a championship game ended in a draw because no one thought to include an overtime stipulation.
  • A scene in Death Note clearly shows the New York skyline with the Twin Towers intact. This anime was made in 2006. It takes place in 2004-onwards in the manga and 2007-onwards in the anime. (But if you want a different way to go about it, consider it to be an Alternate Universe where the events of Nine-Eleven have been swapped out for Kira.)
    • This Troper believes L caught the whole thing before it happened.
  • Bartender explains that the word 'bartender' comes from 'tender' as in 'gentle'.
  • "Hey, trainers! Which one of these Pokemon evolves into Seviper? Okay trainers, if you picked Arbok, you were right!" (Arbok doesn't actually evolve at all.)
    • Not to mention that water-types are totally week against fire-types.
      • To be fair, he was probably supposed to say the water-types were weak to the other guy on the opposing team (an Electabuzz, which they actually were). Likely, Eric Stuart just botched the line and nobody caught it before it hit the air.
      • Who knew Phanpy was a water type?
  • Gundam SEED has a real wallbanger on the law of war. After Kira releases Lacus to the ZAFT forces pursuing the Archangel, he's tried by an ad-hoc court martial and sentenced to death for assisting the enemy, which is then voided because he's technically a civilian and thus cannot be tried under military law. The writers got this precisely backwards.
    • Lacus was at the time effectively being held hostage onboard the Archangel in order to keep their pursuers from attacking them, which is flagrantly illegal under the Geneva Conventions. Kira was not only justified but obligated to release her.
    • At the same time, while Kira had not been formally inducted into the Earth Federation military, he was fighting in uniform on their behalf and would presumably be under the jurisdiction of their military law.
  • The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya. So the Sexy Corset of a Playboy Bunny is a "black leotard"? Dude, the light novel's translator seriously needs to do some research on costumes!

Comic Books
  • The Mexican cartoonist Rius has made several books against the food industry, in one of them he lists as "dangerous food preservatives" Ascorbic acid and Calcium carbonate.
  • One Tintin book has the heroes captured by a remnant of the Inca civilization (don't ask - it's never explained). After finding out that their planned sacrifice to the Sun God happens on the day of a total solar eclipse, Tintin manages to get the nasty savages to release him and his friend by pretending to control the Sun. Except that astronomy (and astrology) was at the heart and center of the Real Life Inca civilization - not only did they know about eclipses and could predict them accurately, they were fully incorporated in the religion. Oops.

FanFic

Film
  • In Universe example: Bluto's speech in Animal House.
    "Over? Did you say "over"? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!"
    "Germans?"
    "Forget it, he's rollin'."
  • Burn Up: During a US Congressional hearing on climate change, a scientist is told that snow levels are increasing in Antarctica. The scientist explains it only snows when it's above freezing. Usually, it's below freezing when snow falls. He's right in the general concept; it's usually too cold to snow in Antarctica. The warmer air is, the more moisture it can hold, and so the heaviest snow falls when the air at cloud level is at or near the freezing point. (At ground level, it theoretically could be anything.) The detail, however — argh!
  • The Core is one giant critical research failure from beginning to end.
    • An obligatory foreign city getting destroyed sequence involved the (stone) Colosseum in Rome becoming a giant lightning rod and then exploding.
    • The Core is either a Stealth Parody or a case of They Just Didnt Care, since they had physicists on staff. Why else would the ship's hull be made of "Unobtainium"?
    • They only had one physicist, and his job was to shoot down the really stupid ideas, though he tended to get vetoed if the reasons weren't simple. He's why the craft didn't have a windshield (but it's a diamond windshield!), and that's why dinosaurs didn't feature prominently.
    • Interviews with producers confirm the Stealth Parody — only the producers didn't intend the stealth part. Is there a term for a Ret Con motivated by embarrassment?
  • In-story example: The lead in The 40 Year Old Virgin successfully maintains his farce until mentioning that breasts feel like bags of sand. (They are a good deal softer and lighter than that!)
    • He must be really pathetic to not know that. All it would take is one hug from a woman and he could tell it's not sand.
    • Of course he's pathetic (or we're supposed to believe he is). That's kind of the point.
  • Bad sci-fi movies (especially the ones shown on MST 3 K) are a gold mine for this trope. The Phantom Planet, for example, features a plot point where atmospheric changes cause the protagonist to first shrink in size, then grow back to normal (prompting the comment "So people are just balloons?").
  • Animal Planet once did a special about everything Attack of the Killer Shrews and The Giant Gila Monster did wrong, scientifically speaking. Most of these were obvious, like the square cube law. The most glaring one of all? Yes, the lizard they used in The Giant Gila Monster was one of the two poisonous lizards in North America... but they used the wrong species! The Proper title: The Giant Mexican Beaded Lizard.
    • The wrong species is more Didn'tDoTheResearch than Critical Research Failure; the two are closely related and pretty similar in appearance. The beaded lizard is about twice as large, but since it's "giant" anyway, it wouldn't necessarily be immediately apparent whether it was a 50x normal size beaded lizard or a 100x normal size gila monster. The beaded lizard isn't as brightly colored as the gila monster, but maybe they thought it was just dusty.
  • Yet another MST 3 K movie, Terror from the Year 5000, has an archeologist use carbon-14 dating to determine that a metal statue came from the future. And when he and another guy hold a Geiger counter over the statue, they are shocked to learn that it's incredibly radioactive. Seeing as carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope, you'd think they would have noticed this earlier...
    • In the interest of fairness: there are significant amounts of carbon in some alloys (certain kinds of steel, for instance), and while carbon-14 is radioactive, there wouldn't be enough of it for it to be "incredibly radioactive." That said, the notion that you could tell that something was from the future using carbon dating (and that carbon dating for a metal artifact would be accurate in any event... you'd get the date of the coal deposit that was used to make the steel, not the date the steel itself was made) is simply wrong; a scientist getting a radiodate in the future would simply assume the sample had been contaminated.
  • The Day After Tomorrow:
    • A "rising air current" that was apparently cooling the atmosphere in the city at a rate that would drop it to absolute zero in minutes.
    • The critical research failure comes from the fact that it took an existing theory and decided that dramatic changes that would take decades centuries to happen (if they happened at all) were not dramatic enough. Besides, if everything happened in a slightly more realistic time frame, you would have seen the great grand-daughter of the Cheney expy saying that her ancestor was an idiot; you would not have seen the guy himself telling the world that he was wrong. We can't have that now, can we?
    • Also, they outran a WAVE OF COLD that shattered glass and avoided freezing to death by closing a door on it and then standing near a wood and paper fire.
    • Early on, a map shows the gulf stream. It's flowing the wrong way. No wonder the climate went to hell.
    • WOLVES DO NOT KILL PEOPLE FOR NO REASON! Especially if you don't bother them. Guess what the characters did to all those escaped wolves? They didn't bother them. If they ran into their territory on purpose screaming and waving loaded guns over their heads, maybe they wouldn't have been attacked.
      • Wolves can recognize loaded guns?
      • No, but they recognise loud bangs.
  • Ever After. Da Vinci has the hero retrieve a cylinder for him. He opens it and unrolls the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa was painted on wood. Wood doesn't roll.
    • And it was smaller, and at the time presented in the movie it would have been in bright, vivid colours because it wouldn't have accumulated 400 years of dirt and decay. (The painting today is filthy, but the risks of cleaning it are so astronomical that no one is willing to chance it).
    • The same thing happens in the great John Barrymore/Lionel Barrymore caper film Arsene Lupin, in which Lupin steals the Mona Lisa... by wrapping it around his umbrella.
      • This troper does suspect that this might sometimes be on purpose, given that the Mona Lisa was stolen in Real Life...by just taking it off the wall and walking out. Do we want to give people hints now that it's a bit less easy?
      • This troper believes the second troper mistook the first troper's intentions: Lupin wrapped it in his umbrella. Again, the Mona Lisa, being wood, could not do that. I don't think he meant the security.
  • The Transformers movie gets a pass for a lot of things based on Rule Of Cool, but a few things are still outright mistakes.
    • Defcon 3 is not the highest state of alert (although many films still get it wrong other ways).
    • While trapped in the room by Frenzy, Glen is told to hack the computer to get the radio working. He proceeds to turn the monitor around and calls for a screwdriver. If he had been cannibalizing some of the parts (accidentally breaking the vacuum tube aside), it may have made some sorta vague sense. But he doesn't.
      • This troper thought that he was asking for screwdriver to open the monitor and went around scavenging parts. They are in a room filled with electronics parts after all.
    • Also, the Secretary of Defense calls it Defcon Delta, not Defcon Three. Considering that Delta is the fourth in any given sequence (the first being alpha, beta, gamma), that makes it worse. If he'd said "Threat Condition" instead of "Defcon", the line would make much more sense.
      • American Threatcons use the NATO phonetic alphabet. (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta). Delta is still fourth, and an indication that shit just got real.
      • The issue being that the Defcon system rises from five to one. Ergo, Defcon 4 is virtually the normal condition of readiness (there's only one place lower and it's for absolute peacetime). "Shit got real" is Defcon 1.
      • Def Con 1 and Threat Condition Delta are not synonyms, but both of them carry an indication of "reality". It's likely that either the writer conflated the two, or used "Def Con" as a term that people would be more familiar with than "Threat Condition" ... sort of like how people still talk about the "Richter" scale, even though it hasn't actually been used for decades.
      • In real life, DEFCON 1 through 5 denote the US military's readiness status for warfighting. Threat Conditions Alpha through Delta denote the US military's readiness status for terrorist attacks (or surprise attacks in general), which is a related drill but not the same thing. For example, during 9/11 the US military only went to DEFCON 3, but remained in Threat Condition Delta for days.
    • When Agent Simmons scans Sam for radiation, he says he gives off 14 rad. If anyone were actually exposed to enough radiation to give off that much on their own, they'd be dead.
    • In the second one they enter a museum in DC and then open a huge hangar door that apparently leads to ARIZONA.
      • It is probably meant to be the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy facility, which is indeed part of the National Air and Space Museum, and does indeed consist of a bunch of historical aircraft in hangars. But the facility is a separate building quite a few miles away from the main facility i on the National Mall.
  • The tagline of the film Biggles is "Meet Jim Ferguson. He lived a daring double-life with one foot in the 20th century and the other in World War I." Anyone who knows when World War I occurred should see the problem.
  • The 2005 film The Legend of Zorro did this by basing their plot around a villain developing a super-weapon explosive called "nitroglycerin" which is even more powerful than dynamite. Certainly more dangerous...
    • I find this moderately funny, but I have a graduate degree in chemistry; I suspect most people wouldn't immediately see exactly where the humor lies (for those who don't: nitroglycerin came first; dynamite is a "safer" version made by mixing nitroglycerin with, basically, dirt). And, technically, nitroglycerin is more powerful than dynamite, on a pound-for-pound basis.
    • A more obvious example of this would be the timeline awfulness—Santa Anna is fighting the US in the prequel, and then, ten years later, California is voting for statehood (in reality, within two years), and the Confederates are buying nitroglycerine.
  • Stargate.
    • A stone carving is carbon-dated. Putting aside the fact that the type of stone in question is not of direct living origin (which is more of Did Not Do The Research — a lot of people don't understand how carbon-14 dating actually works), the result of this test is assumed to tell the cast when the stone was carved. Anybody actually awake would realize that it should tell them how long ago the stone was formed (or to be pedantic, how long ago it died). On the other hand, most ancient carvings were originally painted, and you might be able to carbon-date microscopic traces of some dyes... but that's giving the writers too much credit.
      • In the directors cut, they show that the air force has the remains of several Horus guards who were fused with rock after trying to come through the gate after it was buried. Its not much of a stretch to assume they somehow dated them.
    • Daniel Jackson, the archeologist, lectures on Sumeric mythology, and describes the goddess Tiamat as a "multi-headed chromatic dragon". So someone confused their D&D Monster Manual with a textbook of Babylonian myths.
      • That had to be intentional.
  • The filmmakers of 40 Days And 40 Nights must not have been practicing Catholics. The "40 days" of Lent don't count Sundays. In reality, the protagonist would either abstain for 46 days and 46 nights (admittedly not as catchy a title) or, like so many Catholics, indulge himself once a week (admittedly not as catchy a premise). This is not really an example of Christianity Is Catholic.
  • In Double Jeopardy, Ashley Judd's husband fakes his death and frames her for the murder. After being paroled, Judd sets out to find her husband and murder him for real, but now with legal impunity, since she "can't be tried for the same crime twice" according to the statute of double jeopardy. This is not actually how double jeopardy works: a person can and should be tried for similar crimes that take place on different dates. If a person is accused and found not guilty of assaulting someone on May 1st, there is no reason why they cannot be accused and tried of assaulting the same person on May 7th. Naturally, this seems a bit incongruous when it comes to murder, but there is no special exception. They would simply vacate her prior conviction (as she was innocent then) and try her all over again. Of course, the actual killing of him seems to be justifiable, as he was about to kill her.
    • Granted, the jury would probably be at a loss for what to do, since you can't logically kill someone twice.
      • Not really. Newly discovered evidence would prove that the first murder never occured, thereby proving that her initial crime was a wrongful conviction and allowing her to be released from her sentence for the first, and only the first, murder. This has no bearing on the second murder, for which she would be tried and convicted.
      • Except that she likely wouldn't be convicted since, as mentioned earlier, she now has a legitimate self-defense plea (and her probation officer, whose life she saved, testifying for her). She likely goes free, and the DA's office is left with the ramifications of wrongfully convicting her the first time.
      • Well then they should probably have called the movie "Self Defense" then. Regardless of the actual plot of the film the Double Jeopardy premise is ridiculous on it's face.
  • In Resident Evil: Extinction the T-Virus somehow dries up every river and sea in the world. We shit you not. It doesn't evaporate or anything, it's just gone. The filmmaker's were in such a hurry to rip off Mad Max that they didn't realize Earth already has plenty of desert landscapes they could have set the movie in, so cue the biggest Wall Banger yet in a film series already saturated with them.
  • Total Recall
    • The protagonist mentions that "if Mars had an atmosphere, it would be almost entirely oxygen." First of all — Mars has an atmosphere. Look up. See how the sky is pink? Why is there a colored sky? Because there is an atmospere. Also, how would the guy know what the atmosphere would be composed of?
    • There's also a scene where the wall of a Mars colony gets a hole in it, and everything in the room is sucked out as if there were a total vacuum outside. WTF?
      • While it doesn't make up for all of the mistakes, the difference in the Martian atmospheric pressure and the pressure the domes would have would be a factor of around 3300. Also the original short story was written 10 years before the Viking missions gave us clear data on the Martian atmosphere.
      • Despite said factor of 3300, the absolute difference is still below a mere 1atm. Besides, even if there was no atmosphere, Vacuum Does Not Work That Way.
      • Except the original short story didn't involve anything about the atmosphere on Mars. The "twist" of the story involved him realizing he really was a secret agent who'd been to Mars and asking them to overwrite it with something absurd like having been the first person to meet the aliens. Except... they run into more buried memories showing exactly that.
  • Roland Emmerich's latest disaster movie 2012 looks to out-stupid even The Day After Tomorrow. I mean, this trailer for the film refers to the Mayans as "mankind's earliest civilization" within the first thirty seconds. Mr. Emmerich: The Sumerians, the Assyrians, the Persians, the Babylonians, the Chinese, and the Romans would like a word with you...
    • Not like it matters, because that trailer looks totally fucking awesome.
    • So would the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Nubians, Puntians, Libyans, Hyksos, Phoenicians, Sea Peoples, Greeks, Trojans...
    • Still not as amusing as the fact that "the end of time" apparently means "earthquakes destroy famous landmarks."
    • ...and the Akkadians, Indus, Thracians, Hebrews, Minoans, Druids, Gojoseon...
    • ...to say nothing of, say, the Olmecs, who predated the Maya by centuries on the same freakin' continent.
    • Oh yeah and the Mayans viewed the end of the Great Cycle about the same as we view New Year's Eve. It's the end of a cycle, so restart the calendar, have a party, and it's new cycle time. The world, shockingly, goes on.
    • A little detail, but nonetheless... Why is the kid in the car playing a PSP? A currently undersold console, living off a new model each year? Why isn't he even playing a PSP Go in the bloody 2012?
    • Cuz in a shocking moment of almost prophetic knowledge,the writes were aware of its massive SUCK!
      • It gets worse. Checking the page for it at The Other Wiki it seems like not even the Mayans agreed exactly on when the Great Cycle would end — some places had it going up to 20, not 13 — nor how many units there are. At least one inscription has so many units involved that it is vastly larger than the current estimated age of the universe.
    • It bears repeating, the central PREMISE of the film, that nonsense pop fluff about the world ending in 2012 as "The Mayans predicted" that has been spread about so much lately, is complete bunk. The Mayans simply had a calender, and that calender, not being infinite, thus had an end, which just goes right back to the beginning of the calender. Get it? It's cyclical, just like ours. And in fact, the Mayans had traditions for celebrating that very occasion when another cycle would pass on their calender.
  • In Patch Adams, the titular character is ranting at God after love interest Carin dies. At one point he laments that of all the creatures on Earth, humans are the only ones who kill their own kind. Really, Patch? Ever watch the Discovery Channel? It'd be more accurate to say that humans are the only ones who feel bad about it.
    • Addressed in Mike Nelson's Movie Megacheese:
    Mike Nelson: I hate to kick a man when he's down, but you're quite wrong, future doctor Hunter "Patch" Adams. I think the Black Widow Spider Council might have something to say about that.
  • The film Jaws and the novel on which it is based are notable for their highly inaccurate depiction of shark behavior, making sharks out to be endlessly violent, uncontrollable "eating machines." The film was so successful that it spawned a nationwide, albeit highly irrational fear of sharks, and panic over "shark attacks" that persists on some level to this day. To his credit, Peter Benchley admitted that he Did Not Do The Research in his earlier work, and advocated for shark conservation and education in the years leading up to his death.
    • Jaws was based on a series of shark attacks in New Jersey in 1916, which have sometimes been blame on a single great white or bull shark. However, the "rogue shark" theory which held sway for decades has since been debunked.
  • While much of the *ahem* "science" in What The BLEEP Do We Know is pretty bad to someone who knows a few things about quantum mechanics, the movie got a F in the "biology" section with the magnificent statement "the cell is the basic unit of consciousness". Not the brain cell. The cell.
    • It also states that since the Native Americans that met the first explorers had never seen an ocean fairing vessel before, they could not comprehend it and thus could not see it, only the disturbance it made in the water, until their cheiftan figured it out.
  • The first X Files movie. This Troper has lived in North Texas for 30 years and can unequivocally say that there is no desert on the outskirts of Dallas.
    • And no Neanderthals wandering around in that area tens of thousands of years ago, either.
  • The makers of Tremors actually made an effort in this department (more-or-less correctly using the phrases "residual boulders" and "Pleistocene alluvials"), but it got away from them when the seismologist grad-student says that because there's nothing like Graboids in the fossil record, the creatures must "pre-date the record".
  • The Mel Gibson movie Maverick featured a rather glaring oversight. During the final poker game the deal is seen to shuffle the deck only to cunningly switch it with a different deck. He then begins dealing from the substitute deck using cards from the bottom. If he swapped the deck out though, he has had ample opportunity to rig the replacement so that the cards are in the order he desires. At best he would be dealing only from the bottom of the deck for the person who he's cheating for since he can toss him a specific set of 5 cards while giving the rest to everyone else. Either method of cheating would be valid, but both together makes no sense.

Literature
  • Dan Brown.
    • The most basic grasp of cryptography is enough to realize that the whole premise of Dan Brown's Digital Fortress was nonsense: a "new" type of code that is unbreakable even when trying every possible code key. In reality this is called a one-time pad, which The Other Wiki says has been around since 1917, and is much simpler than the technobabble Brown came up with. Brown gets a point for accuracy because it is actually central to the plot that the premise was nonsense (it's all a big scam), but minus one million because highly trained NSA cryptologists not realizing it's nonsense is also central to the plot.
    • Another classic line in that book was a description of the legendary Enigma machine as "the Nazis' twelve-ton encryption beast". Clearly Brown never read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. Nor did he see Das Boot. Or U-571. Or 'Allo 'Allo!. Enigma was the size of a small case and could be carried by a single person.
    • The most brilliant cryptographic mind in the world sets the password on his doomsday device to the number "3".
    • The entire NSA was scrambling around trying to figure out the answer to a simple riddle that anyone who took high school chemistry could easily figure out. The Nagasaki Bomb used Plutonium, not Uranium. From a story stand point, the "primary difference" could have been 2 (based off atomic numbers) rather than 3 (based off the fraudulent atomic masses).
    • The TRANSLTR supercomputer the NSA uses to break encryption is said to be able to brute-force key lengths in the thousands in a matter of hours. There is a minimum amount of energy that is needed to represent a certain state. If you take that as the maximum energy efficiency such a computer could achieve, it would take more than the energy output of your average supernova to simply count from 0 to 2^256, which is the number of possible keys for a 256-bit key. And of course, the energy and time cost double with every bit added.
      • Actually, that applies to symmetric keys, for which (ideally) the fastest way to break the key is to try every possible combination. (This ideal case never happens.) Hence, even the most paranoid users of symmetric-key cryptography never use keys over 256 bits. Public keys, which are completely different, can be mathematically analysed in ways that symmetric keys can't (though they have other advantages), must use longer key lengths, in the thousands. However, 4096-bit public keys have a similar property to 256-bit symmetric keys, in that they can't really be brute forced under our current understanding of physics.
    • Let's try the kanji.
    • The book extensively depicts a country with about the same HDI as the USA as a 3rd world hell hole.
    • Spain, and the city of Seville, and the descriptions of the country and the city were not merely insulting, they were infuriating. At least other authors admit they never investigated the place they write about, but Brown dares to lie saying he has been in Seville and has done his research of the city. For starters, Spain can have normal wounds healed in hospitals, thank you very much. And it's fun to see Brown's character going "upstairs" in the Giralda, the city's most known landmark. Mainly, because any Sevillain knows the Giralda doesn't have stairs: it has slopes.
  • Clive Cussler novel Atlantis Found
    • The good guys discover the bad guys' plan is to separate a large ice shelf from Antarctica, at high tide, and allow it to float away which will cause the Earth to become unbalanced, the continents to suddenly shift, and civilization collapse while the bad guys ride it out in a gigantic ark. For those who don't see the problem, a floating object displaces its mass: if the ice floats away, it is replaced by a mass of water that's exactly the same.
    • The same novel has vehicles used in Antarctica being specially modified to work in the thin air, since the air gets so much thinner at the poles due to Earth's rotation. Uh, no. While the air above the poles is slightly thinner because of the cold and Earth's rotation, the air at the South Pole is mostly thinner because it's at 10,000 feet above sea level.
    • This is the same novel where a 1940s diesel/electric-powered German U-Boat remains in working order and undetected by the superpowers during the entirety of the Cold War? Undetection is reasonable enough, provided that the operators were careful. A U-boat that holes up in an out-of-the-way harbor, that avoids the sonars-that-be and doesn't draw attention to itself shouldn't have much trouble.
    • It's a Cussler book. By necessity, it runs on Rule Of Cool.
  • In The Big Friendly Giant, the titular BFG (no, not that kind of BFG) goes on a rant about how Humans Are Bastards because they're the only species that kill members of the same species. Anvilicious if in-character on its own, goes straight into Wallbanger territory when you realize the author was entirely serious about this aesop.
  • Lucy Hawking's The Accidental Marathon has a few of these.
    • A police artist, when she became successful as a contemporary artist, quit her job and "breathed a sigh of relief that she would never have to lift a set of fingerprints...again". That would be part of the job of a fingerprint expert, not a police artist, however.
    • A potential witness who could clear the protagonist's name if he testified in court in the UK is a field agent for the CIA. Fortunately for the protagonist, her lawyer is able to call him as a witness because in a Deus Ex Machina, he just happens to be visiting the United Kingdom...as a member of an ex-president's security detail. The Critical Research Failure is that the Secret Service, not the CIA, handles such security, and it is clear from the story that he has been transferred within the CIA to the worst job they could think of, not that he quit and went to work for the Secret Service.
  • Margaret Mahy's Miranda's Big Mistake. A character is described as tripping over her costume's tail while playing one end of the pushmi-pullyu. The pushmi-pullyu has a head at both ends, as anyone whose knowledge of Dr. Dolittle didn't come from Eddie Murphy movies would know.
  • Jacqueline Rayner's Doctor Who novel, The Last Dodo, features "Mervin, the missing link between fish and mammals", which is just what it sounds like it should be. The thing is, we already know the steps between fish and mammals — they're called amphibians and reptiles. (Amphibians and primitive synapsids, since we want to be pedantic. Most scientists don't classify synapsids as "reptiles" anymore.)
  • In The Catcher in the Rye, this is used in universe when Holden Caulfield writes a paper about ancient Egypt, which reads thusly: "The Egyptians were an ancient race of Caucasians residing in one of the northern sections of Africa. The latter as we all know is the largest continent in the Eastern Hemisphere. The Egyptians are extremely interesting to us today for various reasons. Modern science would still like to know what the secret ingredients were that the Egyptians used when they wrapped up dead people so that their faces would not rot for innumerable centuries. This interesting riddle is still quite a challenge to modern science in the twentieth century." That is the whole paper. Holden also wrote a note blatantly telling the teacher that that was all he knew and that he couldn't pay attention in class.
  • There's a Star Trek book in which the author tried to convert from Fahrenheit to Celsius (or "centigrade", as it's called in the book) merely by subtracting 32, without dividing by 1.8 afterwards. As a result, a supposedly perfect paradise planet is said to have a mean surface temperature of a "pleasant 50 degrees centigrade". That's 122 Degrees Fahrenheit.
  • When Star Wars Expanded Universe Continuity Nods, overlap with this trope, you get the works of Karen Traviss, Mandalorian shiller extraordinaire. She readily admits to not having read the rest of the EU - any of it. Instead, she tells the editors what kind of character, planet, species, or tech she wants to use, they give her a summary of something previously established in the EU, and she disregards any details inconvenient to what she wants to write. Apparently those editors never bother telling her that Admiral Daala is a General Failure of the highest degree, that Scout is weak but well-regarded, or that long-established Jedi characters would not suddenly worship her Mandalorians. The Star Wars Expanded Universe is very cohesive for an EU, but Traviss is dismissive of this, calling people who object the "Talifan".
    • And yet when the Star Wars EU and the on-going Clone Wars series dared to contradict details of her work, she very publicly announced her departure from the Star Wars universe - abandoning a number of novels and books she had been contracted to write in doing so.
    • But there was much rejoicing when she threw her hissy fit and quit. Now we won't need to be shown her crap anymore.
  • "The Longest Science Fiction Story Ever Told" by Arthur C. Clarke centers around the story "The Anticipator" by Morley Roberts...only Clarke misattributes it to H. G. Wells.
  • The Eye Of Argon: the eponymous gem is a "scarlet emerald". There actually is such a thing as a red emerald, called "bixbite", but it's doubtful the author knew this. When said gem turns into a slime monster, however, it oozes green slime. The theory put forth in the MST is that the author was red-green colourblind.

Live Action TV
  • Boston Legal, to the extent that chronicling them would take its own wiki. Lawyers routinely meet with judges without the presence of opposing counsel, evidence that has nothing to do with the case is introduced, the closing arguments frequently have nothing to do with the case, and the same firm occasionally represents both sides in a case. Or, we could be talking about Ally Mc Beal here.
  • Hercules The Legendary Journeys, the Kevin Sorbo series in which Greek and Roman gods are introduced by name to the Greek hero. However, despite the usual modern perception, the two Pantheons were considered distinct when they were still worshiped. A few groups combined them, but they were mixed with the Egyptian gods just as often. Given Herc also meets the Norse gods, this isn't all that unusual.
    • Hercules and Xena could be the trope namers for this. Julius Caesar being alive at the same time as the Trojan War? The story of Abraham and Isaac happening at the same time as that of David and Goliath? Ghengis Khan and Lao Tze? Make it stop Mommy! Make the Bad Men stop! Or they could be the Trope Namers for Rule Of Funny and prime examples of the MST 3 K Mantra. I'm guessing fast food, supermarkets and references to Christmas weren't in Ancient Greece either...
  • The heading stuff about Homer's handwriting is a reference to a bit in Sea Quest.
  • Star Trek The Next Generation:
    • In "Genesis", Mr Exposition mentioned how antibodies were forcing mutations in someone's DNA. Antibodies are protein markers that attach to the surface of foreign objects in the body and direct T-cells to annihilate the intruder — they have neither the means to enter a cellular nucleus, nor the ability to cause alterations in DNA.
    • To be fair, this is likely a simple case of technobabble misnomer. The episode writer probably meant to use retrovirus as the culprit du jour. If this troper's memory serves, at the time ST:TNG was wrapping up, retroviruses were still a relatively unexplored and largely unknown concept. (Unlike today, where they seem to be overtaking radiation to explain bizarre genetic mutations.
    • In "The Royale", Data announces that the planet they are orbiting has a surface temperature of -291 Kelvin. For the record, the Kelvin scale is absolute- there is no temperature below 0. Humorously, this temperature is also impossible in Celsius, which the writers may have meant. Technically, negative Kelvin temperatures do exist. However, they are ridiculously hot, not cold (and not actually below zero); -291 Kelvin is actually rather close to the the hottest possible absolute temperature, relatively speaking. Considering what the writers were trying to convey, though, this makes it even worse.
  • The Star Trek Enterprise episode "Dear Doctor" gets evolution completely wrong. Supposedly, a species of sentient people have evolved a genetic defect that is killing them off to make room for an upcoming sentient species. Okay, species could potentially die off if bad genes somehow pass on enough times, for enough generations. Yet what Phlox was describing was that somehow the bad gene for the dying species was a deliberate move by evolution to clear that species out of the way. Evolution is a sentient or deliberate force? Either way, Phlox was describing the dying species basically adapting a failure, which is the opposite of the way evolutions work. Species die from failure to adapt, not adapting failures.
    • Just to add insult to injury, he then refuses to help the dying species for reasons supposedly somehow connected to medical ethics. Pretty much the entire point of medicine is to get in the way of natural selection.
  • Star Trek Voyager had its share of Did Not Do The Research but one incident that finds its way into critical research failure, is in the very second episode. The characters find themselves trapped in a singularity. How do they get out? By finding a crack in the event horizon. For reference the event horizon is a mathematically defined sphere around the center of a black hole (Or any other sufficiently dense Negative Space Wedgie), determined as the point at which light can no longer escape. There is nothing to crack.
    • Ironically, the Lightspeed Event Horizon of a singularity means nothing to a FTL-capable vessel. And yet, everyone makes that mistake. In Star Trek's case, you have to worry about the subspace event horizon, beyond which you couldn't escape at warp 9.99999. Warp Ten, on the other hand...
    • Fortunately, "Threshold" never happened, even according to its author, so we won't have to talk about the "evolution" there.
  • The Weakest Link research team proved itself the weakest link when the question was asked to a contestant "Montreal is the capital city of which Canadian province?" They claimed the answer was Quebec, while in fact the correct answer is none. Quebec City is the capital of Quebec, as Montreal has not been the capital city of the province since its parliament was burned down during a riot in 1849. Anyone who uses Google for more than porn picture image searches could have found that critical detail in under 10 seconds.
    • Furthermore, the current Canadian constitution was written in 1867. At the time the Montreal parliament was burned down, Canada had no provinces, and no part of it was named "Quebec". Canada itself was divided in western and eastern Canada, roughly equivalent to the southern parts of what we now call Ontario and Quebec. Montreal was only ever the capital of eastern Canada, and the province of Quebec as we know it today was named after its capital, after Quebec City had been the capital of eastern Canada for nearly 20 years.
    • The same show also had a episode with the question 'In which century did the First World War take place, the nineteenth or the twentieth' and gave the right answer as 'the nineteenth'.
  • 24. Jack Bauer makes a successful cell [mobile] phone call from inside the hold of a flying aircraft. Shouts of, 'It's a Faraday cage!!' were heard...
  • In one Farscape tie-in novel the heroes' escape depends on Rygel's helium farts exploding. But of course, it must have been metastable helium!
  • A brilliant moment in the 2008 series of The Apprentice (UK) involved a candidate who claimed to be a "good Jewish boy" trying to buy a Kosher chicken in Morocco... from a Muslim butcher. He thought it'd be "close enough". For the win, he asked the butcher if the chicken was "blessed" and made the sign of the cross. While the blessing bit is a bit confusing, halal and kosher rules are sufficiently similar to each other that in countries where the two religious groups are speaking to each other, it's not uncommon for one group to shop at the other's stores when the alternative is unavailable; quite literally, halal is considered "close enough" to kosher and vice versa for many.
  • Sure, you may not expect a lot of research in Soap Operas, but when FBI Agent Winifred started talking about a box to secure a toxin as being "metal with titanium alloy", this troper started banging his head against a wall.
  • An episode of Voyagers had the main characters having to stop von Braun's group of rocket scientists from surrendering to the Russians, "Or man will never walk on the moon". Uh, wouldn't they just work with Korolev's group? Or do cosmonauts not count as human? Even if von Braun hadn't been intrumental in landing a man on the moon, even if such landing hadn't taken place in 1969, and even if the USA hadn't been the ones to make such a launch, saying it would never happen is patently ridiculous. The laws of physics are there for anyone to pick up and play with, and since it is possible, it would have been done at some point. Also to be noted the Russians were reasonably close to accomplishing it sans von Braun: they had landed unmanned probes, and had a good chance at launching a manned mission until N-1 blew up on the pad.
    • remember this show was made in 1983, so - no, russians do not count as human
    • Not to mention, the idea that, at the end of world war 2, people would be considering walking on the moon as an important goal seems quite iffy.
      • People in general? No. Werner von Braun specifically, however... yeah, I can see him buying into that argument.
  • An episode of McMillan & Wife had Sally kidnapped by a rogue group of Satanists due to her resemblance to the Egyptian goddess Serena. The Satanists' leader's identity is exposed because he makes a comment about ancient Egypt. There are so many things wrong with this, but here are some of the big ones: 1) There is no connection between any form of Satan worship and Egypt. 2) There was no Egyptian goddess named "Serena." 3) "Serena" isn't an even remotely Egyptian name.
  • One could argue that the base of existence for Mythbusters is to defy many of the science based research failures.
  • In an episode of The New Avengers (with Joanna Lumley), a man is turned into a murder weapon by being injected with numerous infectious diseases but also being treated for them, so that he lives but anyone he touches dies. Pretty implausible, but hey, it's The Avengers. The CRF is that one of the diseases mentioned is "beriberi" — which is caused by a vitamin deficiency, and can't even come close to being spread by touch.
  • In The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Sarah Connor uses a defibrillator to short out a tracking device that was implanted in her; this also stops her heart. That's all okay. But then she gets up and runs away a few minutes later with no help whatsoever.
  • One must wonder if the ratings demise of Jericho may been attributed by the second episode of the series. According to this episode and the one to follow, a nuclear fallout would only last a few hours and thus everyone would be coming out to sunshine and daisies without sufficient harm (even the corn crops would still be safe to eat!) It's a far cry from the realistic horror of nuclear war portrayed in BBC's Threads. Though it suggested later in the season that all of this is retconned and that the fallout never hit Jericho, thus making the excitement and suspense behind the episode "Fallout" rather pointless.
  • Doctor Who's not our timeline/The Gunfighters tells/Ike Clanton survived at/The OK Corral/There was no Warren Earp there/To meet with his doom/And there was no Johnny Ringo at/The Last Chance Saloon. It's more a case of Rule of Cool; the writer had carried out extensive research into the events in question (even contacting a friend who was in Tombstone at the time), but instead decided to go with his own version of the story.
  • 10.5. We need only start with the fact that there's no such thing as a magnitude 10.5 earthquake: such a thing would have to involve a fault that reached all the way around the world. Then add "lubricating" faults with water, "sealing" them with nukes, earthquakes that follow people down railway tracks ...
    • Possibly topped by the Sci Fi channel movie Mega Fault. The premise is that a giant earthquake opens a crack in the ground that stretches from the east coast of the US to the Grand Canyon. This one has a lot of cracks following people down roads.
  • Star Trek The Original Series examples:
  • In the first episode of Heroes Volume Four, several of the characters find themselves on board an airplane that undergoes a rapid cabin depressurization at altitude. Anything or anyone that isn't tied down naturally starts flying out the hole, and the plane experiences massive turbulance. The Critical Research Failure bit is where the effects of the depressurization continue for the entire duration of the plane's descent. Even when it's less than 500 feet off the ground.
  • NCIS plays it pretty loose with science and technology, but one glaring example stands out. During one episode their computer network is being hacked by someone. Abby madly taps at her keyboard to try and counter this but isn't fast enough. So Mc Gee jumps on the other side of the keyboard and they madly tap away. Unless anti-hacking software somehow involves a mini-game with a two player mode then they aren't going to accomplish anything. Not the mention the simplest solution being a phone call to their IT support with orders to unplug their network from the internet. Assuming they are on the internet, I'm pretty sure the US military have a seperate network for their own use.
    • Didn't that scene involve being hacked by someone who was using the agency's own intranet? Still doesn't excuse the rapid-fire typing magic, but does explain why they didn't just unplug the internet gateway.

New Media

Newspaper Comics
  • Tank Macnamara frequently uses Real Life Writes The Plot for Take Thats against events in sports they don't like. In 1999, a series parodied an infamous loss by the Baylor University football team where they gave up the winning score on a fumble while trying to score one more touchdown themselves instead of running out the clock. The series had only the coach wanting the extra score and the players nearly revolting to try and stop him. In the real Baylor game, the players admitted they wanted to go for the extra score.
    • That's a critical logic failure as well as a research failure. Going for the next touchdown is an action requiring the willing cooperation of the entire offensive squad! What, short of outright mind control, is the coach supposed to be able to do to stop the quarterback from simply taking a knee after the snap?

Sports
  • Many sports historians and Penn State football fans lament that Penn State should have been national champions in 1969 and never got the chance to prove it against the Texas team given the final No.1 vote. In fact, the Nittany Lions were given the opportunity: Penn State was the first team invited to play the eventual Southwest Conference champion in the Cotton Bowl that year, and they instead committed to the Orange Bowl before Michigan's upset over Ohio State assured that the SWC champion would be voted No.1. They chose the Orange bowl because the players wanted to spend New Years in Miami instead of Dallas.

Video Games
  • In Koudelka, the first part of the Shadow Hearts series, the action takes place in an old Abbey in Wales. Which, the manual cheerfully tells everyone, including people living there, is a "small country in the north of England".
  • In the PSP game Def Jam: Fight for NY: Takeover (a prime example of Colon Cancer), there is plenty of cringe-inducing trash-talk that gets tossed back and forth before almost every fight in the main storyline. One of the opponents you can fight for money in the Dragon House is named Prodigy. All trash talk pertaining to this opponent makes reference to him claiming to be a prophet. The only possible explanation for this is that the game designers failed to realize that "Prodigy" and "Prophesy" do not mean the same thing.
  • In Metal Gear Solid, two characters are revealed to be clones of each other, except "one got all the recessive genes, whereas the other got all the dominant ones." This makes no sense whatsoever; you can't divide one's genome into dominant and recessive genes and create viable specimens out of that, much less expect them to have the very same appearance as is the case in the game. Of course, as it turns out, the character stating this was both A. deliberately misled about it and B. to use a technical term, balls-out insane. An attempt at justification claims he didn't understand biology. Also, he has blond hair - which is a recessive gene.
    • Blondeness is not a gene. It's a recessive allele for the gene coding for hair colour. Vital difference.
    • A potential explantion is given in the sequel, where a character reveals that the goverment has supressed and changed much true information over the years to feed to the masses. This brings up the idea that perhaps the explantion of genes we have in the real world is incorrect in the context of the games due to government coverups.
  • In the single player mode of Metroid Prime: Hunters, at the very start the player encounters a Synergy Generator. Ouch.at
  • Has no one here played Battlestations: Midway? The final mission of the campaign is the battle of midway. They get every single fact about that battle wrong.. Most egregious is the fact that there are no Devastator torpedo bombers!
  • No More Heroes has the main character talk about gamers in the opening. He ends by saying that if they're impatient, they should "press the A Button, and let the bloodshed begin!". Cutscenes, including that one, are only skippable by pressibg the + Button.

Western Animation
  • The Danny Phantom episode "Infinite Realms" was made of this trope. It has the standard faulty witch-burning "fact", but the really annoying bit was when Vlad tried to complete his desire to "rule the earth from the skies" by taking down the Wright brothers' flyer. First of all, someone as illustrious as Vlad would know that hot air balloons and zeppelins had existed for at least decades before the first heavier-than-air vehicle. Secondly, it was common knowledge that the tech was becoming feasible, and a lot of people were getting in on it. Thirdly, the Wright brothers studied and tested the theories regarding flight of that time, so the crash would simply convince them to do more tests. Fourthly, they would not notice a big hole in the wing, attribute their failure to that, repair the plane, and try again?
    • Also, they weren't the only ones trying at the time. 14-bis, anyone?
  • In the X-Men animated episode Days of Future Past, Part 2, Gambit travels to Washington, D.C. But the monitor shows the State of Washington (with Washington, D.C. captioned right below).
  • A Totally Spies episode had a bad guy fire a ray that absorbed all water at a woman drinking some from a bottle and her bottle becoming empty. Never mind that the human body is mostly water and the woman would have probably shriveled up and died. You had us at "A ray gun that absorbs water". After that little gem, nothing more needs to be said
  • Silver Hawks. The entire cartoon is one big research failure from beginning to end.
    • Kind of ironic how each episode ended with a quiz on space factoids, huh?
      • The Italian adaptation of 'Silver Hawks'' also adds a twist of [1]. One of the quizzes was "What is the most abundant component of air?" The alien kid in the copper armor first gives a wrong answer (he says "oxygen"). The computer corrects him, showing the word "nitrogen" on the screen. Unfortunately, when this happens, the voice of the computer (which is supposed to read what is on the screen) says "anidride carbonica", which actually means "carbon dioxide".
  • An early episode of My Life As A Teenage Robot had a chemistry professor ask that the titular android use a laser to heat a flask to twelve degrees kelvin.
    • So many problems... For those of you who don't know the physics, 0 Kelvin is absolute zero. Hydrogen condenses at 20 Kelvin. Also, Kelvin isn't measured in degrees...
    • I remember the request to be twelve hundred degrees kelvin, which is an acceptable 1700 degrees Fahrenheit.
  • In an episode of Jimmie Newtron, Boy Genius, Newtron does a report on Thomas Edison. Why? Because Edison invented electricity.

Web Comics
  • This episode of Closet Gamers shows how Critical Research Failure may end... Especially when you don't have any red-crested twitterers around.
  • Surprisingly enough, Penny Arcade made a Critical Research Failure about video games in this comic, where Tycho asserts that Mega Man X was the tenth Mega Man game. It was actually the 9th game to be released in North America, and the 11th game in Japan, according to The Other Wiki, meaning he's almost right. Even so, one could assume that the CRF is the punchline for that particular comic. Also, the X doesn't stand for 10; the protagonist's name is X.
    • Arguably, this trope is the entire point of that comic.
    • On the other hand, the strip in question did give us the immortal epithet "slack-jawed junkslut".
    • Check the dueling newsposts for that strip for more fun.
    • This is even funnier retroactively since Capcom brought out Megaman 9 in September of 2008. So now if we ignore the Megaman & Bass spinoff that was incorrectly labeled "Megaman 9" by many fans, X actually is the 10th entry in the series chronologically. So now we should all start complaining that X2 wasn't named XI.

Real Life
  • The picture at the top of this page. To answer the protestor's question: Yes. Yes we did. In retrospect, we wouldn't. But history can't be changed unless one can time travel. And even then, things get a little tricky.
    • Subverted, in that the Olympics are awarded years in advance: Germany won the right to host the Games in 1931, when it was still a democracy, even if the Nazis were already a powerful force in the legislature.
  • The quote at the top of this page. In addition to the fact that Homer did not write his stories but tell them orally, the Greek civilization is more in the neighborhood of ~3000 years old, not the ridiculous 5000 year manuscript in the example.
  • Tony Blair once stated that Britain and the USA stood side by side 'during the Blitz', that is, the German bombing of UK cities in World War II. By the time the USA joined the war, the Blitz had long since ended. George Bush went one better, stating that Japan and the USA had cooperated successfully for 100 years...
    • To be fair (but also to go into extreme semantics), Bush never said 100 consecutive years. (though even then, most of the cooperation would have been total indifference to each other)
    • But Turkish President Abdullah Gul really took the cake. During a recent visit to Moscow he eulogized about peaceful and harmonic relations between Russia and Turkey... for the last 400 years. Cheerfully ignoring the fact that for the best part of these four centuries said relations basically boiled down to one, barely intermittent, war.
  • In the build-up to the Iraq War in 2002, one CBC journalist claimed that "relations between Britain and France were at 'historical lows.'" Everyone who has even the slightest knowledge of history rolled their eyes.
    • Fun fact for those who only know Hollywood European history: Britain and France have spent more time at war with each other than Germany has spent existing.
      • There's actually a delightful scene in the 1980s British sitcom Yes, Prime Minister that showcases this beautifully. Top Civil Service mandarin Sir Humphrey Appleby is explaining to the British Prime Minister Jim Hacker that the real reason the UK has nuclear weapons isn't because of the Soviets, it's because of the French. When a confused Hacker states that France and the UK are allies, Sir Humphrey points out that while that may be true now, we've actually been deadly enemies at each other's throats for most of the past 900 years.
  • At one point in early 2007, a Canadian MP from Newfoundland complained about the European Union's plans to ban the import of seal products (seals are routinely killed and processed in Newfoundland) by saying that "There are two members of the European Union that also kill seals, and those are Russia and Norway".
    • If you're laughing because Russia is obviously not part of the European Union: less obviously, Norway isn't either.
    • This is a reoccuring theme in the Canadian Parliament since the Conservatives government was elected. Most high-ranking officials have their jobs because of previous connections to Prime Minister Harper. Gary Goodyear, the Minister of State for Science and Technology, has only one College degree. From the Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College. He, the science minister, also avoids the question of whether or not he believes in evolution.
  • Almost every news story in the world about drugs contains a Critical Research Failure, especially in the UK. Common themes are that modern strains of cannabis called "skunk" are anything between 20 and 200 times stronger than 30 years ago, that the street value of a confiscated stash is some ludicrously high amount, and that the destructive effects that cocaine has upon its producer countries has something to do with the pharmacology of the drug.
    • Articles about cannabis on the BBC News website often feature a stock photo of a pile of leaves and twigs that were probably pulled out of a nearby hedge.
  • Jack White of the White Stripes once claimed that "Think about it: every time there's a list of the 100 greatest records of all time, all those albums were recorded in two days". As Julian Baggini points out, the lists routinely include albums such as 'Dark Side of the Moon', 'Pet Sounds' and 'Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" which took many months to record and utilised the latest studio technology available.
    • To be fair, he has claimed he has opinions that didn't matter, and, according to his self-reported medical history, a brain that felt like pancake batter.
  • A particular data type in .NET Framework has a constructor that takes the number of "biliseconds" as one of its parameters, "bilisecond" apparently being a special unit of time created by Bill Gates (and defined in the documentation as a billionth of a second). That a billionth of a second already has a name ("nanosecond") is bad enough, but it's not the worst part. I'll let the following quote from developers of the competing implementation speak for itself:
    Some genius in MS came up with 'bilisecond', and gave it the ambiguous definition of one-"billionth" of a second. I'm almost tempted to use a nanosecond or a picosecond depending on the current culture :-) But, wait!! it turns out it's a microsecond, in reality. AAAAAAAAAAAARGH. Did this misguided individual think that a millisecond is a millionth of a second and thus come up with the dastardly name and the very wrong definition?
  • Saying a news medium suffers from this from time to time is an understatement.
  • At one point in time, there was a Steam news piece that included a brief bio for Epic, saying that their breakout hit was Gears Of War. WHAT.
    • To be fair, Unreal is relatively unknown outside gamer culture. Gears was the first game of theirs to sell well to "casual gamers". Valve (the company running Steam) really ought to know better, as the games they make are just as unknown to casual gamers. I have heard several people say that Left 4 Dead was their first game.
  • Three was a news story about the Space Shuttle, and in the box under whoever was speaking read thus: "...the Space Shuttle travels sixteen times the speed of light..."
    • Cor! That shuttle's mass approaches sixteen times infinity! What are the odds?
    • Or it's mass would be imaginary and it's traveling backward through time.
  • Evolution is impossible: it violates the second law of thermodynamics! UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it.
  • How had we gone this long without mentioning the appearance of pop psychologist Cooper Laurance on Fox News' Live Desk? She made a very imaginative characterization of Video game Mass Effect, claiming it contained an 'interactive sex sim', all the while the Fox news staff making simularly stilted comments. Later it was discovered that Dr. Laurance made these statements while in fact being completely and totally ignorant of the games actual content. There is not doing research, and then there is pulling 'facts' right out of your ass. You know there's a particularly Critical Research Failure when even friggen Jack Thompson called her out on it.
  • A tourism ad promoting a show called Enigmatic Malaysia in the Discovery Channel featured the Balinese Pendet dancer. This prompted outrage from the Balinese dances, and then the people of Indonesia - the Internet is filled with provocative messages about how Malaysia is attempting to steal every ounce of Indonesian culture, and even the Indonesia government is demanding Malaysia an apology. Any layman would know how Malaysia and Indonesia share the same ancestral origins, and even most Malaysians have ancestors from Indonesia. Anyways, turns out it was a mistake by the network.
  • Apparently, two newspapers in Bangladesh picked up and ran a story from a well-known American news outlet, to the effect that Neil Armstrong had finally admitted that the Apollo moon landings were fake. The source of the story? The Onion. Oops.
    • More jarringly, the The Onion article doesn't even say that Armstrong admitted the landings to be fake. It says that Armstrong got convinced by a conspiracy theorist that the landings were faked, which doesn't make any sense. Not only does this show a critical failure at making some basic source material research by those newspapers, it also shows a total lack of thinking logically.
  • In an editorial arguing against universal healthcare, Investor's Business Daily said "People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless." Hawking was surprised at this article, since he lives in the U.K.. He replied "I wouldn't be here today if it were not for the NHS...I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived." Which was then followed up that the claim that Hawking only got the treatment he needed because he was a world-renowned scientist worth a lot of money to the British government. When his ALS manifested, he had only just started on his Ph.D.
  • Many physics teachers, when creating homework, just throw numbers onto a page and don't consider the logical implications they bear with them. The worst this troper has seen is a movie stuntwoman that can, literally, leap tall buildings in a single bound (or at least 24-foot buildings). Some teachers bring this back around to Rule Of Cool territory by using the character of an incredibly careless person who, for example, drives at 50 meters per second (over 110 miles per hour) down the freeway, sees his exit just went by, and throws the gears into reverse immediately. (He had a special model of car that could handle that without launching the gearbox through the roof.)
  • This Troper recently saw a bumper sticker aimed at female fans of the University of Texas: "T" Girl
    • I honestly had no idea why you were calling this out until I looked at what the link was. This is hardly Critical Research Failure; do you find references to "Mr. T" to be side-splittingly hilarious for the same reason?
  • An amusingly ironic example appears on a History Channel documentary about bogus 9/11 theories, in which a conspiracy theorist self-righteously compares others' doubting his idea to how Galileo was mocked for saying the Earth was round. Apparently, if you're the kind of person for whom a building destroyed by a jetliner impact looks like one being detonated by hidden explosives, "goes around the sun" sounds like "is round". Or "Galileo" sounds like "popular misconceptions about Columbus".
  • Bob Hope once entertained on the USS John F. Kennedy in the '80s. One of his first jokes was the following:
    Hope: "It's easy to tell this ship is atomic powered. I shook hands with the captain and my nose lit up!"
  • The Kennedy wasn't nuclear. It was oil-powered. Whoops.
  • Tom Araya is Catholic. Kerry King, who writes virtually all the Satanic and otherwise anti-religious Slayer songs, is an atheist. Whoever thought there were Satanists in the band are dead wrong. Same goes for Danzig, as Glenn Danzig, who writes nearly every song the band's ever recorded, is also an atheist (yet is spiritual) and merely sees Satan as an interesting figure in Christian theology.
  • The Sea Shepherd Society, an animal rights group, often spray paints white harp seal pups and cuddles up with them for pictures. But seal mothers will abandon their pups if their scent is altered, which spray-painting and human contact does. Oops?
  • After the Matthew Shepard Act passed, affording protection as a class in hate crimes to gay people, Pat Robertson said that there "wouldn't be a chance" that the protection would be extended to the religious. Yeah, about that...

The Most Triumphant Example
Cowboy Bebop At His Computer
« Did Not Do The Research »
Dan Browned
Did Not Do The Research
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