These Idioms Are Destroyed by Science

A recent study from two undergraduates at the University of Leicester has proven, once and for all, that Justin Timberlake doesn't know what he's talking about. In a short paper, the students demonstrate that it is physically impossible for a person to cry a river. Even if we made every person on Earth watch Titanic while simultaneously listening to Sarah McLachlan, and then gathered the inevitable flood of tears, all of humanity still wouldn't fill a river. As a benchmark, they used the shortest river on the planet, the Roe River on Montana, which is 61 meters long and sees about 153 million gallons of water pass through a day. They then took the average volume of tears cried in a minute (yes, someone actually measured this) carried through to a whole day, and found that there just aren't enough people on Earth to fill a river with tears of ...