Case File #0077

Sep 6, 2026 — 10 rounds, declassified. The fabrication in each is marked; the truth of all three follows. Play today's case →

  1. Round 1 ANIMALS
    • ✓ TRUE

      Tardigrades can survive being dried out for years by shriveling into a dormant, barrel-shaped state called a tun.

      TRUE — in the tun state their metabolism nearly stops, letting them wait out drought until water returns.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Tardigrades are the largest animals able to enter cryptobiosis, reaching up to five centimeters in length.

      FALSE — tardigrades are microscopic, typically around half a millimeter long; you generally need a microscope to see them.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Tardigrades have survived direct exposure to the vacuum and radiation of open space.

      TRUE — in a 2007 orbital experiment, some tardigrades exposed to space vacuum and radiation survived and later reproduced.

  2. Round 2 ANIMALS
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      An elephant's trunk contains a single long bone that lets it lift heavy logs.

      FALSE — the trunk has no bones at all; it's a boneless structure built from tens of thousands of muscle units.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Elephants can communicate across long distances using low-frequency rumbles, some too deep for humans to hear.

      TRUE — these infrasonic rumbles can travel for kilometers and coordinate distant herds.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Elephants can pick up ground vibrations through their feet, helping them sense distant events.

      TRUE — they detect seismic waves through sensitive feet and can respond to vibrations from far away.

  3. Round 3 SCIENCE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Teflon was invented specifically for the Apollo space program to shield spacecraft from heat.

      FALSE. Teflon was discovered by accident in 1938, decades before Apollo, and wasn't created for spacecraft.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Superglue sets so fast because moisture, even the humidity in air, triggers it to harden.

      TRUE. Cyanoacrylate glue cures on contact with trace water, which is why it grabs skin so quickly.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Non-stick pans are coated with PTFE, a polymer so slippery that very little will stick to it.

      TRUE. PTFE (Teflon) has an extremely low-friction surface that resists sticking.

  4. Round 4 NATURE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The Mariana Trench is so deep that sunlight only reaches its bottom around midday.

      FALSE — no sunlight reaches the bottom at all; light fades out within the first kilometer, and the trench floor lies near 11 km down in total darkness.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The ocean generates a large share of Earth's oxygen, much of it produced by photosynthesizing plankton near the surface.

      TRUE — marine phytoplankton are estimated to produce roughly half of the planet's oxygen.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Sound travels several times faster through water than through air.

      TRUE — sound moves about 1,500 m/s in seawater versus about 340 m/s in air, roughly four times faster.

  5. Round 5 ANIMALS
    • ✓ TRUE

      A cuttlefish can change its skin colour, pattern and even texture in under a second.

      TRUE. Specialised pigment cells and skin muscles let it shift appearance almost instantly.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Cuttlefish are true fish, belonging to the same vertebrate group as sharks and rays.

      FALSE. Despite the name, they are not fish at all — they are cephalopods, marine molluscs related to octopus and squid.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Inside a cuttlefish is a porous internal shell, the cuttlebone, which helps it control buoyancy and is often given to pet birds.

      TRUE. The gas-and-mineral cuttlebone acts as a buoyancy aid and a calcium supplement for caged birds.

  6. Round 6 SPACE
    • ✓ TRUE

      The Moon is gradually drifting farther from Earth, moving away by a few centimeters every year.

      TRUE. Tidal interactions push it outward at roughly the rate your fingernails grow.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The same side of the Moon always faces Earth because it turns once on its axis for each orbit it makes.

      TRUE. This tidal locking keeps the far side hidden from Earth-based viewers.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The Moon has no gravity of its own, which is why the Apollo astronauts floated rather than walked on it.

      FALSE. The Moon has about one-sixth of Earth's gravity; astronauts bounced and walked, they did not float.

  7. Round 7 NATURE
    • ✓ TRUE

      A single cumulus cloud can weigh hundreds of tonnes, yet it floats because that mass is spread thinly across an enormous volume of air.

      TRUE — the water is dispersed as tiny droplets, so the cloud's density stays close to the surrounding air.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Snow is always white because it is made of frozen white ice crystals.

      FALSE — ice is actually clear; snow looks white because light scatters off the many surfaces of countless tiny crystals.

    • ✓ TRUE

      No two snowflakes are structurally identical, because each one grows along a unique path of temperature and humidity.

      TRUE — the branching pattern records the exact conditions the flake passed through, making duplicates effectively impossible.

  8. Round 8 LANGUAGE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The word 'butterfly' was originally 'flutterby', and its two parts were swapped over the centuries through common mispronunciation.

      FALSE. The historical form is 'butterfly' (Old English buttorfleoge); 'flutterby' is a modern playful reversal, not the original.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'lord' descends from an Old English compound meaning roughly 'loaf-keeper' or guardian of the bread.

      TRUE. 'Hlafweard' (loaf-ward) contracted over time into 'lord'.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'window' comes from an Old Norse compound literally meaning 'wind-eye'.

      TRUE. Early openings let in air and light, so they were called a 'wind-eye'.

  9. Round 9 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Lake Victoria in Africa is the deepest lake on Earth, dropping more than 1,600 metres at its centre.

      FALSE. Lake Victoria is quite shallow (around 80 m); Baikal is the deepest lake, not Victoria.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Lake Baikal in Siberia is the deepest freshwater lake in the world.

      TRUE. Baikal is the deepest freshwater lake, plunging over 1,600 metres.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Lake Baikal holds roughly a fifth of the world's unfrozen fresh surface water.

      TRUE. Baikal alone contains about 20% of Earth's unfrozen fresh surface water.

  10. Round 10 HISTORY
    • ✓ TRUE

      Norse voyagers reached North America around the year 1000 and built a settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland.

      TRUE — the excavated site confirms Europeans crossed the Atlantic centuries before Columbus.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The Norse gave the name 'Vinland' to lands they explored west of their Greenland colonies.

      TRUE — the sagas describe Vinland, likely named for wild grapes or fertile meadows.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Viking warriors routinely wore horned helmets into battle, as proven by horned helmets recovered from their graves.

      FALSE — no genuine Viking horned battle helmet has ever been found; the image comes from 19th-century opera and art.

← All past cases

Baloney — spot the fabricated fact before the timer runs out

Each round is three short statements, two of them true and one invented. Baloney is a free daily game about catching a plausible lie you do not have the knowledge to refute. No account, no install, ten rounds a day.

What the game actually asks you to do

Every UTC day, Baloney deals the same ten rounds to everyone. Each round is three short statements on a single topic, and exactly one of the three is a fabrication written by the people who made the game. You read all three and tap the one you believe is invented. A thirty-second timer runs on each round, and if it expires without a tap the round is scored as a miss — a detective who cannot decide has been fooled.

The moment you tap, the round resolves in place. The invention is stamped FAKE, the other two are stamped TRUE, and all three carry a one-line explanation of the real story, so a round never leaves a false claim sitting in your head without the correction next to it. The fabrication also reports what share of that day's players fell for it.

Ten rounds is a run of at most about five minutes, and usually less, since a round ends the moment you commit. Then you get a score out of ten, a verdict band, and your streak. A perfect ten is "Baloney Immune"; eight or nine is "Certified Skeptic"; six or seven is "Sharp Nose"; four or five is "Occasionally Fooled"; two or three is "Easily Fooled"; zero or one is "Believes Everything". There is nothing to install, no account and no email address.

Why this is not a trivia game

The distinction is the whole point of the format. Trivia asks whether you know a fact. Baloney asks whether you can smell a lie. You are never asked what is true — you are asked to catch what is false — and those turn out to be different muscles. Someone who would fail every general-knowledge quiz can still be an excellent fake-spotter, because nothing in the game requires recall.

That is also why the game is not easier on the subjects you know. A fabricated claim about a topic you are confident in gets less scrutiny than a claim about a topic you know is foreign to you; expertise is exactly the camouflage a good lie hides behind.

The design also closes off the cheapest shortcut. In every round the two true statements are chosen to sound improbable — they are the ones that provoke "that can't be real". So the feeling of disbelief is not evidence. Two of the three statements earn that reaction honestly, and only one deserves it.

What the game refuses to make up

Most daily games show you a number about "other players" and you take it on faith. Baloney's crowd line is built so that it cannot be invented, and you can see the seams if you look for them. The "% got fooled" figure is the real share of that day's finishers who missed that exact fabrication. Until at least twenty people have finished the day, the line is omitted entirely rather than estimated — on a quiet morning you will see nothing where the number would be, which is the correct answer.

The percentile works the same way. When you finish, your score is submitted once to the day's tally, which returns the day's score distribution; "you were sharper than X% of today's detectives" is the share of players who scored at or below you, computed from that distribution. If the tally is unreachable or the crowd is still too small, that sentence is replaced by "You're one of the first on the case today." Your score, your band and your streak are arithmetic in your own browser and never wait on a network call, so a failed request costs you a crowd figure, not your result.

Two smaller honesties are worth stating plainly. Your streak and today's result are stored in your browser's local storage, not on a server, which means they do not follow you to another device and clearing your browsing data clears them. And the once-a-day lock is client-side — best-effort rather than tamper-proof. A determined player can clear storage and replay, and the archive below will answer any past case outright. The game would rather say that than imply a security it does not have.

The case pool, in numbers

The pool currently holds 150 rounds and ten are served per day, so the whole pool cycles every fifteen days — with daily play a round comes back about two weeks later. The topics and their counts: animals 22, geography 21, language 19, science 19, nature 18, space 17, history 17, food 17.

Two things are worth knowing before you play, and both are checkable rather than asserted. The first is that length is not a tell. Across the pool the fabrications average 104 characters and the true statements average 104 as well, and the fake is the longest statement in its round only about a third of the time. The supposedly "too tidy" fabrication is not measurably tidier than the facts it is hiding among.

The second is that position is not a tell. Of the 150 rounds, 52 put the fabrication in the first slot, 50 in the second and 48 in the third — against the roughly 50 apiece you would expect if position were random. The widest gap is four rounds, well inside the wobble a fair coin gives at this sample size, so no slot is worth favouring: tapping the first statement every time is worth what tapping the third is worth, which is what guessing is worth. An earlier version of this page reported a real third-slot bias — 67 rounds out of 150; the statements are no longer served in the order they were written, and that edge is gone.

The archive is what makes numbers like these verifiable instead of promotional. It lists the past month of closed cases, and each one opens fully declassified: which statement was the invention, and the truth of all three.

Practising, and what to practise on

Because past cases declassify, the archive is also the only real training ground. Reading an old case file cold — deciding before you scroll to the answer — beats replaying a round you already know, and it builds a sample bigger than ten rounds a day.

A few habits earn their keep across both.

Questions people ask

Is Baloney free, and do I need an account?
It is free and there is no account. The game is ad-supported, runs in your browser and installs nothing. Your streak and today's result are kept in your own browser, so there is nothing to sign up for and no personal details are asked for.
Are the facts in Baloney real?
Two of the three statements in every round are genuine facts. The third is a fabrication written by the game's authors, and it is always revealed and corrected in the same round it appears, so nothing false is left planted in your memory unexplained.
How long does one game take?
Ten rounds with a thirty-second timer on each, so at most about five minutes and usually less, because a round ends as soon as you tap a statement. There is no way to bank time between rounds.
Is it the same puzzle for everyone?
Yes. One set of ten rounds is served per UTC day and the same set goes to every player, with a fresh case at midnight UTC. That is what makes comparing a verdict with a friend meaningful — you both faced the identical statements.
What does "% got fooled" mean, and why is it sometimes missing?
It is the real share of that day's players who failed to catch that particular fabrication. It is hidden until at least twenty people have finished the day, and it is never estimated or filled in with a plausible-looking number — so if you are playing early or the game is quiet, the line simply is not there.
Can I play past days?
Yes, through the case archive, which lists roughly the last month of closed cases. Each past case opens fully declassified — the fabrication marked, and the truth behind all three statements — which makes it a usable practice set. Today's case stays sealed until you have played it.

Last reviewed 2026-09-17.