Late last month, Forbes, Quartz and other outlets began sounding the alarm about "Smartphone-Loss Anxiety Disorder," a new term "coined by researchers" for an illness and confirmed "real thing" "lurking in your pocket" like some kind of deadly trouser snake.

On Thursday, media outlets across the English-speaking world creamed their collective space-jeans over a possible "alien thigh bone" recently photographed by the Mars rover Curiosity. Citing the basement-renowned astronomists at Ufo-blogger.com, the Huffington Post, The Independent and the Daily Mirror all published empty speculation about the "mysterious object," the last naming it "the latest in a string of sightings of fossilised bones that enthusiasts have spotted."

News organizations treating The Onion's satire as reality is nothing new, but there's an especially tragic quality to the error when the dupe is one of the oldest science magazines in the country.

On Friday, Popular Science, the Daily Mail and others reported that the 40-inch "world's longest dinosaur poo" was going up for auction later this month, available to well-heeled scat lovers for an estimated $10,000. That works out to $250 per inch, which is really pretty reasonable, or at least would be if the fecal fossil were any of the things those outlets claimed.

On Monday, Detroit's WXYZ reported a red-bellied pacu had been caught in nearby Lake St. Clair, renewing fears from last summer that the weirdly toothy piranha relative was coming for our junk. As described by Vocativ, KMGH Denver and others, the pacu is "known for consuming human testicles" earning it the nickname "the ball cutter." But America's testicle-havers will be happy to learn the chiefly vegetarian fish's reputation for ball consumption is unfounded, the result of a decade-long game of telephone.

This week, pale people both home and abroad wigged out after Scotland's Daily Record published an article claiming "redheads could become extinct" due to climate change. Citing an unnamed scientist, the paper forwarded the idea that increased sun exposure could kill off the world's ginger population like so many freckle-faced vampires, possibly within a few hundred years. Unfortunately for redheads coveting their potential conservation status (and the dupes at the Huffington Post, Glamour and The Independent), this story is total bullshit.