The first Rosh Hashanah supposedly occurred in the Garden of Eden. But what does this important Jewish holiday involve today?

1. IT LITERALLY TRANSLATES AS “HEAD OF THE YEAR.”

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, can fall any time between the fifth of September and the fifth of October on the Gregorian Calendar. On the Jewish calendar, it is the first day of the month of Tishrei and marks the start of the High Holy Days (Yom Kippur occurs 10 days later). These days are also known as the days of awe, ushering in the final phase of atonement. The holiday celebrates the anniversary of the creation of the world, which according to Jewish tradition was 4777 years ago.

2. FOR THE MONTH BEFORE, JEWS ASK FOR FORGIVENESS FROM FRIENDS AND FAMILY.

In order to have a clean slate going into the New Year, Jews ask for forgiveness from those close to them. The idea here is that God cannot forgive transgressions against people until those wronged have forgiven.

3. TRADITIONALLY, ROSH HASHANAH HAPPENS OVER TWO DAYS.

These days are combined into the yoma arichta, or “long day.” At sunset on the first evening, candles are lit by the lady of the house. Then blessings are recited: a traditional holiday blessing over the candles, followed by the shehecheyanu, a thanksgiving prayer for special occasions. Both evenings also feature a festive meal.

4. UNLIKE DECEMBER 31, THE JEWISH NEW YEAR IS A TIME OF SERIOUS REFLECTION AND REPENTANCE.

Even Jews who go to synagogue at no other time of year will often go on the high holidays, which include Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Religious poems called piyyutim are recited and a special high holy day prayer book called the machzor is used. The service is often longer than Sabbath services, and centers around the theme of God’s sovereignty, remembrance, and blasts of the shofar (see below).

5. DESPITE NOT BEING A HUGE PARTY, JEWS ARE EXPECTED TO ENJOY THE YOM TOV, OR HOLIDAY.

People often get fresh haircuts and new clothes in order to celebrate. The tradition is to wear white clothing as a sign of purity and renewal. Some avoid wearing red, since it’s the color of blood.

6. ACCORDING TO THE TALMUD, ON ROSH HASHANAH, GOD INSCRIBES EVERYONE’S NAMES INTO ONE OF THREE BOOKS.

The metaphorical understanding is that good people go into the Book of Life, and evil ones into the Book of Death; those who are in the middle are put in an intermediate one and have judgment put off until Yom Kippur. Since virtually no one is all good or all evil, you’re supposed to assume you fall somewhere in the middle, and in order to be inscribed in the Book of Life for the coming year, it is important to do everything possible to atone before Yom Kippur.

7. THE SOUNDING OF THE SHOFAR IS THE MOST ICONIC IMAGE OF THIS HOLIDAY.

The shofar is a ram’s horn that is curved and bent. It is hollowed out and blown during religious ceremonies to make three different sounds. Hearing it is meant to call you to repent.

8. WHILE SOME JEWISH HOLIDAYS INVOLVE FASTING, ROSH HASHANAH INVOLVES A FEAST.

It is traditional to eat apples dipped in honey to represent having a sweet year ahead. A round challah bread symbolizes the cycle of the year (another interpretation is that it represents a crown and thus God’s sovereignty). Sometimes a fish, or just its head, is included, possibly to represent that as fish cannot survive without water, Jews cannot survive without the Torah. Pomegranates contain many seeds, which have long been associated with the commandments that Jews follow, so by eating them they remind themselves to be good in the coming year. Other common foods include dates, leeks, gourds, and black-eyed peas, all of which are mentioned in the Talmud as foods to eat on New Year’s.

9. SOME BRANCHES OF JUDAISM PARTICIPATE IN THE RITUAL OF TASHLIKH, OR “CASTING OFF.”

The ritual involves standing near water, like a river, and reciting prayers. Then participants symbolically cast away their sins by throwing bread crumbs or stones into the water. This is supposedly derived from the Biblical passage “You will cast all their sins into the depths of the sea” (Micah 7:19), although most Jewish sources trace it back to 15th century Germany. In New York City, large groups gather on the Brooklyn Bridge, while in Israel—where there is much less open water—people might use something as small as a fish pond.

10. THERE ARE VARIOUS TRADITIONAL GREETINGS FOR ROSH HASHANAH.

L’Shana Tova Tea-ka-tayvu is Hebrew for “May you be inscribed for a good year,” referring to that person’s name being put in the Book of Life. This is often shortened to Shana Tova, which just means “Good Year.” This isn’t to be confused with wishing each other a “Happy New Year.” Happy implies a level of superficiality, while the Jewish wish for a good year hopes the person will achieve their purpose.

11. THE HAVDALAH PRAYER IS PERFORMED AS NIGHT FALLS ON THE SECOND AND LAST DAY.

It involves saying blessings over a full cup of kosher wine or grape juice, although other drinks can be used in a pinch. After this, Rosh Hashanah is over.

Thirst is one of the most basic human signals that allows for our survival. For decades, research on the subject presumed that the brain only knows thirst has been quenched once the water enters the bloodstream. However, research on mice, published in Nature, has found a set of thirst-predicting neurons.

“There are many things you experience every day when you become thirsty or drink water that can’t be explained by [the old] model,” Zachary A. Knight, coauthor of the study and assistant professor in the department of physiology at University of California, San Francisco, tells mental_floss.

He explains that if you’re thirsty and you drink a glass of water, your thirst feels quenched within seconds, “but it takes up to 20 minutes for that water going down your throat to actually reach your bloodstream and change anything.” Likewise, Knight says, it’s a common experience to feel thirsty within seconds of eating something salty—and that response also poses a question: “When that food is still in your mouth or going down your throat, there’s been no change in your blood,” he notes. “How does your brain know that there’s going to be this change in the blood that occurs 10 to 20 minutes into the future?”

Knight and his lab team suspected the answers to these questions resided in a deep brain structure known as the subfornical organ (SFO). Thanks to advances in optogenetics—using tiny fiber-optic probes in the brain to stimulate neurons—and methods of encoding fluorescent proteins into individual neurons, researchers were able to view real-time neural activity in the brains of thirsty mice.

When they stimulated neurons in the SFO of the mice, the animals drank water. Similarly, giving the mice salt stimulated these “thirst” neurons. When they blocked the neurons altogether, the mice didn’t drink water at all—even when their physiology suggested they should. “What was very surprising, and also explains a lot … is that these neurons that people had thought for a long time just sensed the signals in the blood actually receive a second class of signals from the mouth and the oral cavity,” Knight says.

But that’s not the most exciting part, he says. The signals that come from the mouth and oral cavity “basically tell these neurons, on a rapid timescale, about food and water that’s going down the throat in a way that allows these neurons to essentially predict how that food or water is going to change the osmolarity of the blood 20 minutes in the future, when it’s absorbed.”

So how do these thirst neurons know that it’s water going down a person’s throat? Knight says the physical sensation or viscosity of the liquid in your mouth might be picked up on by your nerves, which then send the information to the brain. Another important component—which Knight calls “the most surprising result”—appears to be temperature, “because when you drink water, you’re cooling down your throat” in most cases. “The amount that your throat has been cooled probably loosely correlates with how much water you drank in the very recent term,” Knight says.

Thus, it may explain why people often crave cold water when thirsty or feel quenched by drinking a cold beverage, even if it’s not water. “It’s one of the cues these thirst neurons use to figure out how much water you’ve just been drinking,” he suggests.

Indeed, in one experiment, they found that simply applying a piece of cold metal to a mouse’s tongue would activate the thirst neurons, and the activity would decline when the metal was removed. Even more compelling, they found mice will often lick a piece of cold metal if they are thirsty.

Knight finds this temperature-dependent function a “bizarre phenomenon” that he could see one day being used in creating drinks that are warm but can manipulate your thirst neurons into turning on, so you’d perceive the beverages as tasting cold.

“You could just eliminate refrigerators and ice,” he says.

An estimated 41 million people have played with them. They vary in price from $1 to more than $100,000. They can zip along orange trackways at speeds of almost 600 scale miles per hour. And they’re about to get a big-screen adaptation courtesy of Fast & Furious director Justin Lin. Here are 11 other things you might not know about those iconic racing toys called Hot Wheels.

1. HOT WHEELS WERE THE BRAINCHILD OF ELLIOT HANDLER, WHOSE WIFE CREATED BARBIE.

Elliot and Ruth Handler, along with their friend Harold Matson, founded a picture frame company named Mattel in 1945. Shortly thereafter, Mr. Handler started using spare parts to make dollhouse furniture, which was sold on the side. By 1946, toy manufacturing had become Mattel’s specialty. In its early years, the company’s biggest hits were novelty items like cap guns and ukuleles. Then, in the late 1950s, Ruth hit on what would prove to be a brilliant idea: The Handlers’ young daughter, Barbara, loved to play with paper dolls; inspired, Ruth decided to create a three-dimensional replacement for the primitive toys. Elliot had his doubts, telling his wife that “no mother is ever going to buy her daughter a doll with breasts.” But he was wrong: Barbie debuted in 1959, and within 12 months, Mattel had sold 351,000 of the dolls.

But soon, Elliot would have his own multimillion-dollar idea. In the 1960s, tiny die-cast car toys were all the rage. The dominant force in that market was the English Matchbox brand, whose scaled-down vehicles left a lot to be desired (at least in Handler’s opinion). For one thing, these little cars were all based on existing automobiles. Surely, Handler felt, kids would rather play with designer hot rods. More importantly, the wheels made Matchbox cars difficult to get moving.

Convinced that he could break into the die-cast game, Handler joined forces with a team of designers to create a series of aesthetically-pleasing, lightning-fast cars. Production started in 1967.

2. THERE ARE A FEW CONFLICTING STORIES ABOUT WHERE THE NAME CAME FROM.

In his 2003 book Hot Wheels: 35 Years of Speed, Power, Performance, and Attitude, Randy Leffingwell summarizes the two most popular explanations. Most people credit Handler with coining the name. According to some sources, when the businessman saw designer Fred Adickes testing out a prototype one day, he remarked “That’s one set of hot wheels you’ve got there.”

But Handler himself traced the origin to a chat he once had with Alexandra Laird, who worked in the packaging department. Between 1964 and 1969, she named more or less every outfit in Barbie’s closet and became known as Mattel’s “namesmith.” In her version of the story, Laird started cooking up ideas as soon as she learned about the die-cast project. “I went back and looked at these funny little cars and then wrote a whole bunch of names on a list the way I always did,” Laird said. Suggestion number one was Big Wheels. “Elliot looked at it, half-smirked, and asked me for another word, different from ‘big,’” Laird recalled. “He talked about the custom styling and wondered aloud if that was what people would call ‘hot.’” After that, Handler allegedly blurted out “Hot Wheels,” and the rest is history.

3. ONE OF THE ORIGINAL HOT WHEELS DESIGNERS LATER PUT A NEW SPIN ON THE OSCAR MAYER WIENERMOBILE.

Most of Mattel’s first 16 Hot Wheels cars, which hit the shelves in 1968, were designed by GM’s Harry Bentley Bradley. Hot Wheels aren’t the only pop culture cars he left his mark on, though: In 1995, Bradley designed an all-new Wienermobile for Oscar Mayer. It had aerodynamic windows and hot dog-shaped dashboards.

4. A CAR IN THE ORIGINAL LINE WAS BASED ON THE 1965 DODGE DEORA—WHICH DIDN’T HAVE DOORS!

Among the maiden 16 Hot Wheels, this might have been the strangest. In lieu of doors, the cab of an actual ’65 Deora was equipped with a hatch at the very front of the car. A driver would need to open the hatch and climb in backwards before he or she could sit down behind the wheel. Vehicle customizers Mike and Larry Alexander went to Harry Bradley, and together they created the experimental pickup for the 1967 Detroit Autorama, where it won nine trophies. Full-sized Deoras were never mass-produced.

5. 16 MILLION HOT WHEELS CARS WERE SOLD IN 1968 ALONE.

Demand for these toys hasn’t waned: Mattel estimates that over 4 billion cars have been produced and claims that eight of them are bought every single second.

6. IF YOU’VE GOT ONE WITH RED CIRCLES ON THE WHEELS, IT MIGHT BE WORTH SOME MONEY.

From 1968 to 1977, thin red lines were typically painted around the sidewalls of Hot Wheels tires. But in an effort to cut costs, Mattel went with all-black wheels partway through 1977. Collectors prize the old “redline” Hot Wheels—in fact, certain mint-condition models sell for thousands of dollars.

7. A TIE-IN TV SERIES TOOK SOME HEAT FROM THE FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION.

In 1969, a Hot Wheels cartoon series, sponsored by Mattel, premiered on ABC. The show featured a teenage car racer named Jack “Rabbit” Wheeler who, along with his buddies, always did his best to promote safe driving. The gang also took a firm stand against underage smoking, which they deemed “non-cool.” Mattel’s competitors wrote the FCC to complain that this Hot Wheels cartoon was a program-length commercial in disguise, which undermined federal advertising laws. The FCC concurred, and the resulting changes compelled ABC to cancel Hot Wheels in 1971.

Mattel was able to kick off another tie-in series in 2009, thanks to deregulatory measures that had taken effect during the 1980s. Titled Hot Wheels: Battle Force Five, it ran for two seasons on Cartoon Network.

8. FOR COLLECTORS, THE HOLY GRAIL IS A PINK VOLKSWAGEN WITH REMOVABLE SURFBOARDS.

In 1969, the company unveiled its most famous car to date: the Volkswagen Beach Bomb. With a surfboard loaded onto either side, it looked like the perfect rig for a summer road trip down the California coast.

Designing the iconic toy cars was a challenge: Originally, Mattel’s engineers wanted the surfboards to be removable units that could be loaded into the back of the van through wide-open rear windows. Keeping these specifications in mind, the toymakers built 16 prototypes. Then the team discovered that the Beach Bombs were too narrow to be used on Mattel’s Super Charger race tracks—so they had to come up with a different design. The new VWs were wider and featured side compartments for the boards.

Most of the 16 prototype Beach Bombs are now worth around $15,000 apiece. But a pair of them command a price tag that’s normally reserved for full-sized, driveable Porsches: These are the bright pink, rear-loading 1969 Volkswagen Beach Bombs. According to collector Bruce Pascal, only two such Hot Wheels were ever made (most of the prototypes received a different color scheme). In 2011, one sold for $125,000.

9. THE BRAND HAS COLLABORATED WITH NASA.

In 1998, Mattel teamed up with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory—a NASA research and development center—to create the Hot Wheels JPL Sojourner’s Mars Rover Action Pack Set. The product included a replica of the Sojourner rover, which landed on Mars that summer. Then, in 2012, Mattel renewed its alliance with NASA to manufacture scale models of yet another Red Planet vehicle: the six-wheeled, $2.5 billion Curiosity rover.

10. THE BIGGEST HOT WHEELS TRACK LOOP ON RECORD WAS OVER 12 FEET HIGH.

In 2015, dynamometer technician Matt West built a 5-foot, outdoor Hot Wheels track loop for Blade, his 6-year-old son. “It started as a part-fun, part-physics lesson with my son at home,” West said. Before long, word of their exploits had spread to the technician’s workplace, namely, the Ford Motor Company’s Research and Innovation Center in Dearborn, Michigan. Inspired by West’s playful afternoon, the staff decided to raise the bar for an upcoming Take Your Child to Work Day. Using 4-by-8 sheets of plywood as a stabilizer, Ford’s team set up an enormous Hot Wheels raceway with a massive loop. Guinness World Records later confirmed that, at 12.5 feet tall, it qualified as the largest Hot Wheels Track Loop ever built. On April 23, 2015, this monument to the creative spirit dazzled a crowd of adults and children alike; the very first car to brave the track was a Hot Wheels Ford Mustang.

11. IN 2011, THE HOT WHEELS BRAND WAS INDUCTED INTO THE NATIONAL TOY HALL OF FAME.

Located in Rochester, New York, the National Toy Hall of Fame honors the world’s most influential playthings, from the cardboard box to Raggedy Ann. Mattel’s Hot Wheels line was formally inducted in 2011, along with the dollhouse and the blanket.

In the years immediately after his death in 1616, Shakespeare was merely remembered as a good, though not necessarily brilliant, writer. But as literary styles and tastes changed, Shakespeare’s work began to be appreciated more and more, so that by the mid-19th century, appetite and acclaim for his writing had reached near fanatical levels. By the late Victorian era, Shakespeare was being hailed as a literary genius, the author of perhaps the greatest works of English literature that had ever been written—but the sheer quality of his work soon began to stir up discontent.

We know relatively little of Shakespeare’s life, and only the barest bones about his background and upbringing. But what little we do know paints a fairly humble picture—and it’s precisely that that some Victorian scholars and writers just couldn’t square up with the quality of Shakespeare’s writing.

In 1848, the American author Joseph C. Hart wrote an essay in his travel memoir The Romance of Yachting in which he expressly questioned, for the first time, the true authorship of Shakespeare’s work. Hart was traveling in Europe when he began to ponder an apparent error in the plot to Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: Act 3, scene 3 of the play opens in “Bohemia, a desert country near the sea,” despite the fact that Bohemia—a region of central Europe roughly equivalent to the modern-day Czech Republic—is entirely landlocked. To Hart, such a basic geographical error didn’t sit well with the impossibly high standard of Shakespeare’s writing, which led him to suggest that Shakespeare—dismissed as a “mere factotum of a theatre,” “a copyist for the prompter,” and a “vulgar and unlettered man”—was not the author of the works attributed to him. Shakespeare’s contribution, he suggested, was probably limited to providing the plays’ dirty jokes.

Following the publication of Hart’s memoir, other 19th century writers soon started to break cover and began to question the authorship of Shakespeare’s work themselves. In 1857, writer Delia Bacon published The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded, a work—more than a decade in the making—now credited with providing the earliest fully-formed theory that Shakespeare was not the author of his work. Bacon theorized that the works were the result of a collaboration between a number of high-society Elizabethan writers and figures, including Sir Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser and, most notably of all, Sir Francis Bacon. They, she believed, had left encrypted messages and descriptions of an entirely new philosophical system hidden deep in the wording of Shakespeare’s plays, which they could not be seen to advocate publicly.

Although they didn’t agree with her theory, Bacon’s friendships with several high-profile literary figures of the day (including Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson) helped her notion of a secret cabal of writers gain ground in 19th-century literary circles. By the turn of the century, dozens of books and essays had been written on the subject, societies had been established to promote the so-called “anti-Stratfordian” theory, and several high profile figures—such as Walt Whitman and, later, Sigmund Freud—had signed on to the idea.

For every advocate of the anti-Stratfordian viewpoint, however, there was a pro-Stratfordian only too happy to point out the holes in their arguments. (Even Joseph Hart’s original quibble over Bohemia being landlocked was easily explained by the fact that Shakespeare had based The Winter’s Tale on Pandosto: The Triumph of Time, an earlier work by Robert Greene that made the same mistake.) Still, the authorship question rumbled on—until finally, in the late 1880s, it attracted the attention of Dr. Orville Ward Owen.

THE DOUBTING DOCTOR

Owen was a hugely successful physician based in Detroit who had a habit of reading and memorizing passages of Shakespeare as a way of clearing his mind between patients. Eventually he became so well-versed in Shakespeare’s works that he found he had committed the entire 1623 First Folio to memory, and as a party trick could pinpoint the exact play, act, and scene from which any line given to him was taken. The only lines he struggled with were those that cropped up with almost identical wording in more than one play, and it was precisely these curious repetitions—combined with all the other anachronisms, geographical missteps, and erroneous details that had fueled the authorship debate so far—that led Owen to believe certain passages in Shakespeare’s works must have been implanted deliberately. He concluded that they were the coded passages that would reveal Bacon’s secret message, and he dedicated his life to deciphering them.

Having followed a series of clues littered throughout Shakespeare’s work (“Beginning in the middle, starting thence away …”), Owen worked out a word-based cipher that he then applied to other works outside of the Shakespeare canon—including Arcadia, a 16th-century prose piece by the English poet Sir Philip Sidney (which, he later claimed, Sir Francis Bacon must also have written). All that work left him with the following decrypted passage:

The easiest way to carry on the work is to
Take your knife and cut all our books asunder,
And set the leaves on a great firm wheel
Which rolls and rolls…

It may be a decoded message explaining the best method to decode the code in which it was originally encoded, but Owen nevertheless took his cue from this passage and began construction of an extraordinary contraption to help expedite his research: the cipher wheel.

Around two huge cylindrical spools, each 3-foot by 4-foot, Owen wound an enormous length of canvas fabric, onto which he pasted pages of Shakespeare’s Complete Works plus extracts from his contemporaries’ works. By aligning the pages in a specific order and then turning the spool, vast swathes of text could be analyzed at once. Owen would sit between the two spools, calling out passages of interest to an assistant, who would then collate the extracts for later analysis. Eventually, he managed to decipher a now well-known conspiracy theory: Bacon was not only the true William Shakespeare, but the forgotten son of Queen Elizabeth I and her secret lover Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Shunned from his rightful claim to the throne, Bacon had laid out his scandalous life story into numerous encoded works of literature, the majority of which he attributed to other writers of the day. Owen published his extraordinary theory—and his equally extraordinary methodology—in a vast five-volume treatise, Sir Francis Bacon’s Cipher Story (1893-1895). But he did not stop there.

Continuing his analysis of the jumbled text on his cipher wheel, Owen concluded that Bacon had also written two more long-lost plays—namely The Tragical Historie of Our Late Brother Robert, Earl of Essex and The Historical Tragedy of Mary, Queen of Scots—which Owen claimed to have successfully extracted. But the real prize would be finding the manuscripts and personal belongings that would prove Bacon’s birthright and authorship, which Owen believed were somewhere close to the river Wye on the border of England and Wales. His quest for the truth was about to take him across the Atlantic.

A FRUITLESS SEARCH

Owen arrived in Britain in 1909. A preliminary search in caves behind Chepstow Castle on the banks of the Wye in southwest Wales was turned up nothing, but he returned a year later to carry out an even more extensive examination. Based on further decoded lines from Bacon’s text (“boxes like eels in the mud,” “make a triangle of 123 feet due north and 33 paces,” “I filled up the shallow water …”), Owen financed an excavation of the riverbed of the Wye itself, believing there was a secret vault containing 66 lead-lined boxes somewhere beneath the mud along its course. Two dozen men were employed, several hundredweight of material was excavated, and Owen’s research caused a media frenzy.

A previously unknown Roman bridge was discovered, as was a medieval cistern. But as for proof of Bacon’s royal bloodline and his authorship of Shakespeare’s work? After great expense, Owen unearthed nothing.

In the years that followed, he continued his research with the cipher wheel, but his confidence began to falter and his health began to fail rapidly. Although he continued to provide new textual evidence for other Baconian advocates—who carried out their own explorations around Chepstow in the late 1910s and early 1920s—none found anything ironclad to support their theory. Finally, Owen was quoted as saying:

“When I discovered the word cipher, I had the largest practice of any physician in Detroit. I could have been the greatest surgeon there … but I thought that the world would be eager to hear what I had found. Instead, what did they give me? I have had my name dragged in the mud, had more calumny heaped upon my character than many people can imagine, lost my fortune, ruined my health, and today am a bedridden, almost penniless, invalid.”

He died shortly after, on March 31, 1924, at the age 70. The Baconian and anti-Stratfordian viewpoint has continued to be argued over ever since—although not quite as inventively as with Owen’s cipher wheel.