Case File #0081

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

  1. Round 1 SPACE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Sound travels through the vacuum of space at roughly one-tenth of the speed it moves at on Earth.

      FALSE. Sound cannot travel through a vacuum at all, because there are no molecules to carry the vibrations.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Astronauts tend to grow slightly taller during spaceflight because the spine stretches without gravity compressing it.

      TRUE. The discs between vertebrae expand in microgravity, adding a few centimeters until they return home.

    • ✓ TRUE

      In the microgravity of space, a candle flame burns as a rounded blob rather than the teardrop shape seen on Earth.

      TRUE. Without gravity-driven convection, hot gases don't rise, so flames form spheres.

  2. Round 2 SCIENCE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Honey recovered from ancient Egyptian tombs was still edible thousands of years later, thanks to its low moisture and natural acidity.

      TRUE. Honey's low water content and acidity choke out microbes, so sealed honey can last practically forever.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Honey never freezes or hardens even far below zero, because its dissolved sugars prevent any crystal structure from forming.

      FALSE. Honey actually crystallizes and stiffens over time; cold speeds up the sugar granulation rather than preventing it.

    • ✓ TRUE

      At a specific low pressure called the triple point, water can boil and freeze at the same time.

      TRUE. At the triple point, water's solid, liquid, and gas phases coexist in equilibrium.

  3. Round 3 SPACE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Mercury has almost no atmosphere, so its surface temperature swings dramatically between day and night.

      TRUE. Without air to trap heat, the surface bakes in daylight and plunges far below freezing after dark.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Mercury, being the closest planet to the Sun, is therefore the hottest planet in the solar system.

      FALSE. Venus is hotter; Mercury has almost no atmosphere to hold heat, so its night side turns freezing cold.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Mercury spins three times on its axis for every two orbits it completes around the Sun.

      TRUE. This unusual 3-to-2 spin-orbit lock means a solar day on Mercury lasts two of its years.

  4. Round 4 NATURE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      A rainbow always shows exactly seven distinct colour bands, a count fixed by the physics of how light splits.

      FALSE. A rainbow is a continuous spectrum with no fixed number of bands; 'seven colours' is a naming convention, not physics.

    • ✓ TRUE

      A rainbow is actually a full circle of light; from the ground the horizon simply hides its lower half, so we see only an arc.

      TRUE. A rainbow is a complete circle — pilots and skydivers sometimes see the whole ring.

    • ✓ TRUE

      In the fainter secondary rainbow that can appear above the main one, the order of the colours is reversed.

      TRUE. The outer bow of a double rainbow runs its colours in reverse, from a second internal reflection.

  5. Round 5 SPACE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The International Space Station draws its main electrical power from a small onboard nuclear reactor.

      FALSE. The station runs on large solar arrays, not a reactor, converting sunlight into electricity.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The International Space Station circles Earth about every 90 minutes, so its crew sees roughly 16 sunrises a day.

      TRUE. At orbital speed it laps the planet 16 times daily, giving astronauts frequent sunrises and sunsets.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The International Space Station has been continuously occupied by rotating crews since the year 2000.

      TRUE. Humans have lived aboard without interruption since the first long-duration crew arrived in late 2000.

  6. Round 6 SPACE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Olympus Mons on Mars rises roughly 22 kilometers high, making it the tallest known volcano in the solar system.

      TRUE. It stands about two and a half times the height of Mount Everest above the surrounding plains.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Mars has two small moons, Phobos and Deimos, named for the Greek figures of fear and dread.

      TRUE. Phobos means fear and Deimos means dread, sons of the war god who fits the planet Mars.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Phobos is slowly spiraling away from Mars and will eventually break free to become an independent asteroid.

      FALSE. Phobos is spiraling inward, not outward, and is expected to crash into Mars or shatter into a ring.

  7. Round 7 SCIENCE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Terminal velocity is the steady speed a falling object reaches once air resistance balances gravity.

      TRUE. When drag equals the pull of gravity, the object stops accelerating and falls at a constant speed.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      A penny dropped from the top of a skyscraper would kill a pedestrian standing on the sidewalk below.

      FALSE. A penny's shape and low terminal velocity mean it would sting at worst, not kill.

    • ✓ TRUE

      In a vacuum, a feather and a hammer fall at the same rate, as an astronaut showed on the Moon.

      TRUE. With no air resistance, all objects accelerate equally; Apollo 15 demonstrated this on the Moon.

  8. Round 8 NATURE
    • ✓ TRUE

      A saguaro cactus can live for more than 150 years and may not grow its first arm until it is several decades old.

      TRUE. These giants are slow-growing and long-lived, branching only after many years.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      A cactus stores water by growing a large internal bladder that it fills from its roots like a tank.

      FALSE. Cacti store water throughout their thick, spongy stem tissue rather than in a single bladder-like organ.

    • ✓ TRUE

      A cactus carries out photosynthesis in its thick green stem, while its leaves are reduced to spines.

      TRUE. The spines are modified leaves; the fleshy stem does the photosynthesising.

  9. Round 9 ANIMALS
    • ✓ TRUE

      Some ants can carry objects many times their own body weight, and ants can link their bodies into living rafts to survive floods.

      TRUE. Ants are famously strong for their size and will interlock into floating, water-resistant rafts.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Ants are solitary insects that meet only briefly to mate before going their separate ways.

      FALSE. Ants are among the most social animals on Earth, living in colonies of thousands or millions with divided labour.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Ants communicate mainly through chemical signals called pheromones, laying scent trails that lead nestmates to food.

      TRUE. A forager leaves a pheromone trail that other ants follow and reinforce.

  10. Round 10 HISTORY
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Albert Einstein failed mathematics as a schoolboy and very nearly abandoned his studies before switching to physics.

      FALSE — Einstein excelled at mathematics from a young age; he himself dismissed the failing-math story as nonsense.

    • ✓ TRUE

      In 1905, his so-called miracle year, Einstein published four papers that reshaped modern physics.

      TRUE — the 1905 papers covered the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and mass-energy equivalence.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Einstein was offered the presidency of the state of Israel in 1952 but politely turned it down.

      TRUE — he declined, saying he lacked the aptitude for dealing with people and official duties.

← 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.