“Last Friday, several British newspapers reported that the World Health Organization had found in a study that blonds would become extinct within 200 years, because blondness was caused by a recessive gene that was dying out. The reports were repeated on Friday by anchors for the ABC News program ‘Good Morning America,’ and on Saturday by CNN. There was only one problem, the health organization said in a statement yesterday that it never reported that blonds would become extinct, and it had never done a study on the subject.” Lawrence K. Altman —Stop Those Presses! Blonds, It Seems, Will Survive After All (NY Times–registration req’d)

I was a little suspicious of the original announcement because the BBC story I cited didn’t name the German researchers who supposedly announced the discovery, and the only scientists they actually interviewed all disagreed with the findings of the report.