Author: Erin

Rats are up there with snakes and spiders when it comes scaring the pants off people. One glimpse of a beady-eyed, yellow-toothed rat scuttling across the basement floor or darting down a city sidewalk is enough to make most people scream. There is much to admire about rats (they are smart, surprisingly well-groomed, and they make excellent pets). But let’s face it: They are also the stuff of nightmares. These facts about the two kinds of rats that love to live around people—brown rats (a.k.a. Norway rats, Rattus norvegicus) and black rats (a.k.a. roof rats, R. rattus)—are drawn from the book Frightlopedia. They will fill you with terror, or awe, or perhaps both.

1 YOU CAN’T KEEP THEM OUT …

A rat can squeeze through a hole the size of a quarter, thanks to its collapsible skeleton. Its ribs are hinged at the spine and can fold down like an umbrella, which means that any hole that’s big enough for a rat’s head is big enough for the rest of him.

2. … NOT EVEN WITH A BRICK WALL.

Rats can chomp their way through thick wood, metal pipes, brick walls, and cement. Their front teeth are long—they grow about 5 inches every year—and also very sharp, with a nifty self-sharpening feature: The edges of the upper and lower teeth rub against each other, having the effect of a knife on a whetstone.

3. WHEN THEY BITE, THEY DON’T MESS AROUND.

Rats will usually only bite when cornered. But then they bite hard—very hard. Their jaws are built like an alligator’s and can exert as much as 7000 pounds per square inch—which means their teeth can easily slice down to human bone, as one biologist for New York State discovered when he picked up an errant lab rat with his hand. “It put its teeth straight through my index finger,” Stephen C. Frantz told Richard Conniff in his book Rats! The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. “The membrane over the bone is quite sensitive, and it was grinding its teeth back and forth. I get chills thinking about it.”

4. THEY ARE SUPERB ATHLETES.

The long claws on a rat’s feet allow it to scale brick or cement walls with Spider-man-like ease. Getting down isn’t a problem, either: A rat can fall 50 feet and land on its feet without injuries. Rats are also phenomenal jumpers; they can leap 2 feet in the air from a standing position. With a running start, rats add another foot to their leaps—which, according to Conniff, is equivalent to a person jumping on top of a garage. According to one study [PDF], rats can lift objects that weigh nearly a pound—more than the average rat’s body weight.

5. YES, THEY CAN SWIM UP YOUR TOILET.

Rats can swim for three days straight (in laboratory conditions), they can hold their breath underwater for up to three minutes, and they can perform their skeleton-collapsing trick while swimming. All of which means that, yes, they can paddle through sewer pipes, squeeze through your plumbing, and pop up in your toilet.

6. THEY’RE SEX MACHINES.

Rats leave rabbits in the dust when it comes to reproducing. “If they are not eating, rats are usually having sex,” writes Robert Sullivan in his delightful book Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants. During a single six-hour period of receptivity, a female rat may mate as many as 500 times, which helps explain how, according to Sullivan, a pair of rats can end up producing 15,000 descendants in one year and why they are the most common mammal in the world.

7. THEY COME IN SIZE XXL.

On average, the brown rat is about 16 inches long (including its tail) and weighs less than a pound. If a rat lives near a steady food source, like a dumpster, it can grow to be 20 inches long and weigh 2 pounds. But that’s tiny compared to the Bosavi woolly rat, which was discovered in 2009 by a BBC expedition to an extinct volcano in Papua New Guinea. The 32-inch-long beast weighed more than 3 pounds and showed no fear of humans. It’s thought to be one of the biggest in the world, and it’s a “true rat, the same kind you find in the city sewers,” mammalogist Kristofer Helgen told the BBC. Don’t worry about meeting it on the street, though: The rat, which is believed to belong to the genus Mallomys, lives only in the area of the volcano.

8. THEY MAY BE LAUGHING AT YOU.

Rats make high-pitched chirping sounds (especially when they’re being tickled by humans) that humans can’t hear, but which scientists think may be the equivalent of laughter.

9. THEY HAVE VERY SENSITIVE TASTE BUDS.

It’s not easy to poison a rat. The animals can detect infinitesimal amounts of poison in food—as little as one part per million. “That’s like being able to taste a teaspoonful of chocolate in 1302 gallons of milk,” Conniff writes. Rats are also cautious when eating unfamiliar foods; they’ll start by eating just a tiny bit to make sure they don’t get sick.

10. RATS PREFER THAT YOU DO NOT WASH YOUR FACE.

Occasionally, where there are heavy infestations, rats will bite people’s faces and hands at night while they sleep, drawn by food residue on their skin. That might be a good time to move to a new town because, once a rat bites you, the rat’s chances of biting another human go way up. It’s like how, after finding a new favorite food, you order it at every restaurant you visit. In 1945, Curt Richter, a biologist at Johns Hopkins University, fed human blood to captured rats [PDF] and concluded that “a strong craving for blood might explain why, once having bitten a person, the rats apparently are apt to bite another.”

11. RATS CAN SURVIVE NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS.

During the 1950s, roof rats living on Enewetak Atoll in the South Pacific confounded scientists by surviving atomic bomb testing. While the details are sketchy, it’s believed that early nuclear testing obliterated the Polynesian rat population, and that the atoll was then repopulated with a different species of rat that burrowed deep down to survive future testing.

Famously, in English, it’s possible to form a perfectly grammatical sentence by repeating the word buffalo (and every so often the place name Buffalo) a total of eight times: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo essentially means “buffalo from Buffalo, New York, who intimidate other buffalo from Buffalo, New York, are themselves intimidated by buffalo from Buffalo, New York.” But repetitive or so-called antanaclastic sentences and tongue twisters like these are by no means unique to English—here are a few in other languages that you might want to try.

1. “LE VER VERT VA VERS LE VERRE VERT” // FRENCH

This sentence works less well in print than Buffalo buffalo, of course, but it’s all but impenetrable when read aloud. In French, le ver vert va vers le verre vert means “the green worm goes towards the green glass,” but the words ver (worm), vert (green), vers (towards), and verre (glass) are all homophones pronounced “vair,” with a vowel similar to the E in “bet” or “pet.” In fact, work the French heraldic word for squirrel fur, vair, in there somewhere and you’d have five completely different interpretations of the same sound to deal with.

2. “CUM EO EO EO EO QUOD EUM AMO” // LATIN

Eo can be interpreted as a verb (“I go”), an adverb (“there,” “for that reason”), and an ablative pronoun (“with him” or “by him”) in Latin, each with an array of different shades of meaning. Put four of them in a row in the context cum eo eo eo eo quod eum amo, and you’ll have a sentence meaning “I am going there with him because I love him.”

3. “MALO MALO MALO MALO” // LATIN

An even more confusing Latin sentence is malo malo malo malo. On its own, malo can be a verb (meaning “I prefer,” or “I would rather”); an ablative form of the Latin word for an apple tree, malus (meaning “in an apple tree”); and two entirely different forms (essentially meaning “a bad man,” and “in trouble” or “in adversity”) of the adjective malus, meaning evil or wicked. Although the lengths of the vowels differ slightly when read aloud, put all that together and malo malo malo malo could be interpreted as “I would rather be in an apple tree than a wicked man in adversity.” (Given that the noun malus can also be used to mean “the mast of a ship,” however, this sentence could just as easily be interpreted as, “I would rather be a wicked man in an apple tree than a ship’s mast.”)

4. “FAR, FÅR FÅR FÅR?” // DANISH

Far (pronounced “fah”) is the Danish word for father, while får (pronounced like “for”) can be used both as a noun meaning “sheep“ and as a form of the Danish verb få, meaning “to have.” Far får får får? ultimately means “father, do sheep have sheep?”—to which the reply could come, får får ikke får, får får lam, meaning “sheep do not have sheep, sheep have lambs.”

5. “EEEE EE EE” // MANX

Manx is the Celtic-origin language of the Isle of Man, which has close ties to Irish. In Manx, ee is both a pronoun (“she” or “it”) and a verb (“to eat”), a future tense form of which is eeee (“will eat”). Eight letter Es in a row ultimately can be divided up to mean “she will eat it.”

6. “COMO COMO? COMO COMO COMO COMO!” // SPANISH

Como can be a preposition (“like,” “such as”), an adverb (“as,” “how”), a conjunction (“as”), and a verb (a form of comer, “to eat”) in Spanish, which makes it possible to string together dialogues like this: Como como? Como como como como! Which means “How do I eat? I eat like I eat!”

7. “Á Á A Á Á Á Á.” // ICELANDIC

Á is the Icelandic word for river; a form of the Icelandic word for ewe, ær; a preposition essentially meaning “on” or “in;” and a derivative of the Icelandic verb eiga, meaning “to have,” or “to possess.” Should a person named River be standing beside a river and simultaneously own a sheep standing in or at the same river, then that situation could theoretically be described using the sentence Á á á á á á á in Icelandic.

8. “MAI MAI MAI MAI MAI” // THAI

Thai is a tonal language that uses five different tones or patterns of pronunciation (rising, falling, high, low, and mid or flat) to differentiate between the meanings of otherwise seemingly identical syllables and words: glai, for instance, can mean both “near” and “far” in Thai, just depending on what tone pattern it’s given. Likewise, the Thai equivalent of the sentence “new wood doesn’t burn, does it?” is mai mai mai mai mai—which might seem identical written down, but each syllable would be given a different tone when read aloud.

9. “THE LION-EATING POET IN THE STONE DEN” // MANDARIN CHINESE

Mandarin Chinese is another tonal language, the nuances of which were taken to an extreme level by Yuen Ren Chao, a Chinese-born American linguist and writer renowned for composing a bizarre poem entitled “The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den.” When written in its original Classical Chinese script, the poem appears as a string of different characters. But when transliterated into the Roman alphabet, every one of those characters is nothing more than the syllable shi:

Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.

The only difference between each syllable is its intonation, which can be either flat (shī), rising (shí), falling (shì) or falling and rising (shǐ); you can hear the entire poem being read aloud here, along with its English translation.

The second-largest living fish is a gentle giant with some peculiar habits and a knack for instigating cryptozoological debates. Brush up on your basking shark trivia with these 10 tantalizing tidbits.

1. THEY’RE BUS-SIZED FILTER-FEEDERS.

The two biggest fish in the sea consume surprisingly tiny animals. Basking sharks can grow to be 36 feet long and weigh four tons or more. Within the world of fish, this impressive size is exceeded only by that of the enigmatic whale shark. Those of you with a shark phobia will be relieved to learn that neither species is a big-game hunter; on the contrary, they eat plankton, fish eggs, and other minuscule organisms.

Like whale sharks, basking sharks use filtration to capture their food. The gills of both fish are lined with bristle-like, 3-inch structures called “gill rakers.” When it comes to capturing food, these rakers are critical. To feed, a hungry basking shark opens its colossal mouth—which is 3 feet wide in adult specimens—and swims around at a leisurely 2.5 to four mph. Any prey that might be floating in its path are corralled into the mouth, ensnared by the gill rakers, and then forced down the shark’s narrow throat.

By filtration system standards, the whole apparatus is a model of efficiency. In just 60 minutes, a basking shark can strain at least 1800 tons of water through its gills.

2. PEOPLE USED TO CALL THEM “SUNFISH.”

Over the centuries, English-speakers have given these leviathans plenty of different names, including elephant sharks, bone sharks, and hoe-mothers (“hoe” being descended from the Gaelic word for dogfish). In Scotland and Ireland, the preferred moniker used to be “sunfish.” However, by the turn of the 18th century, this name had become problematic because many people had started using it to describe the ocean sunfish, an entirely different animal with a compressed body and really weird teeth.

Then, in 1769, Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant argued that the filter-feeder should be renamed the basking shark. Why’d he pick that particular name? Like most scientists at the time, Pennant believed that these huge fish hang around near the surface of the ocean in order to absorb solar rays. More recent evidence suggests they really do this because, at higher latitudes, plankton congregates just under the surface. Soaking up sun probably isn’t their main objective. Maybe it’s time for another name change.

3. BASKING SHARKS CAN GO AIRBORNE.

Boaters need to give basking sharks a wide berth. The giant fish might not be man-eaters, but they can still be dangerous. Biologists aren’t sure why, but basking sharks occasionally launch themselves out of the water Free Willy–style and come crashing back down with tremendous force. Maybe they do this in order to impress the opposite sex. Or perhaps breaching the surface helps them get rid of lamprey eels and other parasites that latch onto their skin. Regardless, you’ll want to maintain a respectful distance between your vessel and the sharks. In 1937, one breaching individual accidentally capsized a small boat that was passing through the Firth of Clyde, off the coast of Scotland. Three people drowned.

4. THEIR OIL-RICH LIVERS HELP KEEP THEM AFLOAT.

To regulate their buoyancy, most fish depend on a swim bladder. By regulating the amount of gas inside this organ, a fish can change or maintain its current depth. However, sharks don’t possess swim bladders. Instead, many species have enlarged livers that are filled with helpful oils. These oils sport high concentrations of squalene, a low-density hydrocarbon. Because it’s lighter than seawater, it gives the sharks buoyancy. As a way to compensate for their immense body size, basking sharks have evolved huge, squalene-filled livers—without which they’d sink like rocks.

Historically, basking shark livers were a valuable resource. In Europe and elsewhere, oils extracted from them became a common type of lamp fuel during the 1700s and 1800s. Simultaneously, the squalene was used as a key ingredient in perfumes, industrial lubricants, and man-made silk. Even today, it’s used to temper high-grade steel. To feed the world’s thirst for basking-shark livers, fishermen once slaughtered the animals en masse. Between 1946 and 1986, harpoon fisheries in Ireland, Scotland, and Norway killed 77,204 of them. Fortunately, numerous protective measures have since come into effect, and it’s now illegal to hunt basking sharks in many places.

5. GREAT WHITES AND ORCAS MIGHT BE NATURAL PREDATORS.

Are any non-human animals brave enough to hunt full-grown basking sharks? Maybe. Killer whale pods and great white sharks have been seen feasting on dead specimens. But it’s possible these predators were merely scavenging the remains of basking sharks. No confirmed instance of either species attacking or killing the filter-feeders has been documented.

6. BASKING SHARKS WERE ONCE THOUGHT TO HIBERNATE ON THE OCEAN FLOOR.

In 1953, a pair of biologists suggested that the reason basking sharks seemed to disappear from northern European and American waters every winter was that they were swimming down to the ocean floor and hibernating. The idea spread like wildfire. “At this moment,” reads a 1962 New Scientist article, “there are probably great schools of these enormous fish quietly resting at the bottom of the sea.”

Engaging as such imagery is, we can now confidently dismiss the hypothesis. A 2009 paper published in Current Biology finally answered the riddle of where these sharks go during the chillier months. Near the Massachusetts coastline, the authors fitted 25 basking sharks with satellite tags. The tags started transmitting data from some unexpected locations. “When a tag popped up in the Caribbean Sea, I was really blown away,” co-author Gregory Skomal told National Geographic. A few of his sharks headed even further south—one specimen migrated all the way to Brazil.

Skomal and his co-researchers also learned that the fish frequented some very deep waters as they traveled. For weeks or months at a time, many of the sharks remained somewhere between 650 and 3300 feet below the surface.

7. THEY REEK.

Basking sharks produce a mucus-based slime that covers their skin. Presumably, it’s an anti-parasite defense mechanism that keeps lampreys and other freeloaders at bay. This might explain one of the sludge’s more unusual properties: extraordinary corrosiveness. Nets that come into contact with a basking shark’s hide tend to rot away as the slime burns through their natural fibers. And, as many ichthyologists have noted, the ammonia-rich cocktail also makes basking sharks stink to high heaven. In fact, the smell is so powerful that some fishermen claim they can even smell a fully submerged basking shark from a considerable distance.

8. JUVENILES HAVE HOOK-SHAPED SNOUTS.

The reproductive habits of basking sharks aren’t well understood, and nobody has yet figured out how long they usually live. But at least one thing about their life cycle is clear: juveniles look markedly different from older specimens. Youngsters have fairly long snouts that curve downward. When the animals mature, however, their snouts become straighter and, proportionately, a lot smaller. Such conspicuous differences between the age groups once led scientists to believe that adolescent and adult basking sharks represented two different species.

9. DESPITE THEIR MANY SIMILARITIES, BASKING AND WHALE SHARKS ARE NOT CLOSE RELATIVES.

Our oceans are home to more than 400 shark species. Scientists have divided these up into eight major groups. Basking sharks are classified as lamniformes, along with great whites, shortfin makos, and sandtiger sharks. On the other hand, anatomical and genetic data reveals that whale sharks belong to the orectolobiformes order, as do nurse sharks. Therefore, the filtration systems of Earth’s two biggest fish must have evolved independently—a phenomenon known as convergent evolution.

10. BASKING SHARK CORPSES HAVE OFTEN BEEN MISTAKEN FOR DEAD SEA MONSTERS.

An alleged sea serpent carcass that washed onto a beach near Scituate, Massachusetts in 1970 was positively identified by several experts as the rotting corpse of a basking shark. Seven years later, the Zuiyō Maru, a Japanese fishing trawler, hauled up and photographed a strange-looking cadaver. At first glance, it looked like the creature had a long neck, a small head, and four flippers. This led some to believe that the newly dead animal was really a prehistoric plesiosaur reptile. However, according to tissue samples, it was almost certainly a shark—and most likely one of the “basking” variety.

Over the past 200 years, many other so-called “sea monster” bodies have turned out to be probable basking sharks. Why does the same story keep repeating itself? Well, when the filter-feeders die, their lower jaws tend to break away from the rest of the body at an early stage in the decomposition process. The tail and dorsal fins are also among the first things to fall off. Consequently, a dead basking shark might look an awful lot like a long-necked, small-headed plesiosaur—or maybe some kind of sea serpent—to the untrained eye.

There’s a simple reason why pancakes are round: Because gravity is an excellent chef. Gravity pulls on fluid uniformly, so when a dollop of batter hits the griddle at a right angle, it gets tugged down into a round, symmetrical shape. Meanwhile, surface tension helps hold it in a perfect circle.

If you’re a nonconformist who prefers a Jackson Pollock–style lumberjack breakfast, toss the batter onto the griddle at an angle. Delicious Abstract Expressionism should result!

The United States of America, the great melting pot. We take music, foods, words and traditions from all over the world, shake them up and blend them into something distinctly American. We took “O Sole Mio” and made “It’s Now or Never.” We took pizza and put cheese inside the crust. We take names from places all over the world to give to our towns and cities, and once they’re ours, we’ll pronounce them how we want to, thank you very much. Usually we simply use the English version of the word for a place: we don’t say Par-EE, Texas, the French way, but PARE-iss, because that’s how we say Paris in English. However, some towns that have borrowed city names from elsewhere don’t even get the normal English pronunciation. Here are 20 American towns that have really cut the cord from the sources of their names.

1. Athens, IL; Athens, KY

When we talk about Greece, we talk about Athens, cradle of Western civilization, birthplace of democracy. But these towns in Kentucky and Illinois are called EIGHTH-ens.

2. Berlin, CT; Berlin, MA; New Berlin, NY; Berlin, WI

The German capital Ber-LIN has loaned its name to many an American town, but here we’ve turned it into BER-lin. 

3. Cairo, GA; Cairo, IL

If we’re talking Egypt, we’re talking KAI-ro. But in Georgia it’s KAY-ro, and in Illinois, KEH-ro.

4. Chili, NY

There’s a city in New York named after the South American country of Chile, which we would call CHILL-ee or if you want to get fancy, CHEE-lay—but there they call it CHAI-lai.

5. Riga, NY

Right over by Chili is Riga, a name shared with REE-ga, the capital of Latvia, but in New York it’s RYE-ga.

6. Delhi, NY; Delhi, CA

Delhi, the capital of India, gets cities named after it in New York and California, but it’s hard to tell because while we are used to calling it “Delly” the people in those cities pronounce it DEL-hai.

7. Lebanon, NH

Lebanon? Not in LEB-nen New Hampshire.

8. Lima, OH

The capital of Peru is Lima (LEE-ma). The town named for it in Ohio? LYE-ma.

9. New Madrid, MO

Spain has Madrid (Ma-DRID). But in Missouri they’ve got New MAD-rid. Or wait, is it Missouruh? I don’t think Missourians even agree on that. New MAD-rid though? That they’re all cool with.

10. Mantua, OH; Mantua, UT

Mantua, beautiful Italian city of culture. Opera and Virgil. No wonder we’ve borrowed its name for towns in Ohio and Utah. Oh, except in those places it’s not MAN-tyoo-a, but MAN-a-way.

11. Milan, NY, TN, IL, WA

Milan is mi-LAN, or if you’re really feeling it, mi-LAHN, and it’s another Italian city we pay tribute to in our town names, everywhere from New York to Tennessee to Illinois to Washington State. Except in those places it’s MY-lun.

12. Palermo, ND

Sticking with Italy for a little longer, there’s Palermo (Pa-LER-mo), or, as they say in North Dakota, PAL-er-mo.

13. Pompeii, MI

Michigan honors the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. It’s pom-PAY right? Not in Michigan, where the locals call it pom-pay-eye. What is that extra ‘i’ doing on the end there anyway? Might as well make sure you pronounce it.

14. Italy, TX

Texas has a town named for the whole country of Italy. Itly. Just two syllables.

15. Russia, OH

The country of Russia is represented by a town in Ohio. ROO-shee, Ohio, to be exact.

16. Tripoli, IA

From the halls of Montezuma, to the shores of … Tri-POH-luh? While the capital city of Libya, has miles of Mediterranean coastline, Iowa’s Tripoli has no shore at all. So it goes its own way name-wise too.

17. Versailles, IL, KY, OH, PA

When we speak about the palace in France or the treaty that ended WWI, it’s ver-SAI. For towns from Pennsylvania to Illinois, it’s ver-SAYLES.

18. Montpelier, VT, VA, ID, KY, LA, MD, IA

There are Montpeliers all over the place in the US. How do you pronounce yours? The Vermont way (mont-PEEL-yer) or the more French-style way people sometimes use (mont-pel-YAY)?

19. Vienna, IL; Vienna, SD

When we talk about the Austrian city, the Chicago all beef hot dog, or even the city in Virginia, vee-EH-nuh is the way to go. But for towns in Illinois and South Dakota, it’s vai-EH-nuh.

20. New Prague, MN

The Czech city of Prague is full of old-world charm. The Minnesota city of New Prague has a new-world way of doing things, including pronouncing it PRAYG.

This post originally appeared in 2013.

Hang out with a horse, hike a glacier, and watch the Northern Lights in the land of fire and ice.

On September 9, 1947, programmer Grace Hopper and her Harvard University peers famously described processing issues with the Mark II electromechanical computer as a “bug.” In their case, the culprit was a dead moth stuck in a relay switch, but the word has been used more generally to describe technical and mechanical glitches since the 1870s, when Thomas Edison used the term to describe problems with his inventions.

Advances in computing, the web, and the internet have spawned some nasty bugs over the past several decades, which the National Institute of Standards and Technology estimated in 2002 was costing the U.S. economy upwards of $59.5 billion per year. Many companies use bug bounty programs or enlist software-savvy patrons to hunt down bugs before they cause too much trouble—but despite all our efforts, more than a few have gotten the best of us. 

1. MARINER 1 IS BROUGHT DOWN BY ONE MISPLACED HYPHEN (WE THINK)

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has seen its share of disasters resulting from computer bugs—including during its first planetary mission. NASA launched the Mariner 1 on July 22, 1962, with the intent of sending the probe on a flyby of Venus. But not long after launch, the Atlas-Agena rocket booster blasting Mariner 1 into space started to lose contact with the ground signal, probably due to a faulty antenna. NASA had planned for this scenario; the rocket was supposed to reject the signals and keep on the correct trajectory. But something went wrong with the backup software, throwing off the rocket’s trajectory. There was nothing left to do but abort the mission—and so, just 293 seconds after launch, Mariner 1 was purposely blown up.

What exactly caused the rocket’s software to go haywire is murky, but later reports referred to a tiny error in the guidance system’s coded instructions—variously a dropped hyphen, an “overbar transcription error,” or a misplaced decimal point, depending on the source. According to WIRED, “[officials] may also have been less than forthcoming with hard facts owing to the high-profile nature of the mission … [and] in the face of the much-ballyhooed space race with the Soviet Union, which was well underway by then.” But whatever the glitch’s true cause, sci-fi heavyweight Arthur C. Clarke likely helped Mariner 1 be forever remembered as just another casualty of missed typos that was “wrecked by the most expensive hyphen in history.”

2. ARIANE 5 FLIGHT 501’S PRIMARY AND BACKUP SYSTEMS CRASH IN 0.05 SECONDS

When the European Space Agency’s Ariane 5 rocket launched Flight 501 on June 4, 1996, it did so using working code from the Ariane 4. However, just 36.7 seconds after launch, the Ariane 5’s more powerful engines reportedly set off an arithmetic bug in the flight computer, triggering an overflow condition that crashed both its secondary and primary inertial reference systems (the backup tanked first by 0.05 seconds). This caused the rocket’s primary processor to overpower its engines, and—40 seconds after launch—the craft disintegrated. Thankfully, it was an unmanned test flight.

3. AT&T’S MACHINE NETWORK REPEATEDLY CRASHES ITSELF FOR NINE HOURS

Communication errors don’t just plague space-bound computers, as a major 1990 snafu from telecommunications giant AT&T illustrates. On January 15 of that year, a bug in AT&T’s new version of its software for controlling #4ESS long-distance switches crashed the company’s computers by creating a chain reaction of crash-and-reboot signals that repeated every six seconds. Soon, a network of 114 long-distance switches locked in a hopeless loop of self-sabotage. After approximately 60,000 people were left without long-distance service for around nine hours, AT&T was finally able to fix the glitch by swapping in an older version of the software.

4. GOOGLE THINKS THE ENTIRE WEB IS MALWARE—ITSELF INCLUDED

For up to 55 minutes on the morning of January 31, 2009, Google’s search engine warned users that everything on the web—including its own homepage—was malware. As Google’s then-VP of Search Products & User Experience Marissa Mayer explained on the company’s blog, an updated list of known malicious websites included a single, stray, all-too-common forward slash (or “/” ) as an entry—telling Google’s browser, in effect, that all websites were no-go areas.

5. WINDOWS LOCKS OUT PAYING CUSTOMERS FOR ACTS OF PIRACY

On August 24, 2007, Microsoft unleashed its automated antipiracy processes on legitimate new Windows users thanks to a computer glitch. For as long as 19 hours, people who tried to install legally acquired copies of the operating system were informed by Windows Genuine Advantage, Microsoft’s in-house antipiracy software, that their actions and copies were illegal; new would-be Vista users also had some features shut off. According to Microsoft, what happened was that they sent pre-production code to servers that hadn’t been upgraded to account for changes to product key encryption/decryption, which meant the servers declined all activation requests.

6. THE MARS CLIMATE ORBITER ARRIVES AT ITS DESTINATION … AND DISINTEGRATES

Humankind’s numerous attempts to send crafts to Mars have often met with bad ends because of computer bugs or other technical glitches, and NASA’s efforts are no exception. In 1999, the agency’s $655-million robotic Climate Orbiter probe had finally completed its journey to Mars, where it was supposed to orbit the planet and, eventually, serve as a communications relay for a future Mars lander. But when ground computers that controlled Climate Orbiter’s thrusters calculated its trajectory down to the planet using pound-seconds rather than the newton-seconds NASA expected, the orbiter entered the atmosphere and burned up.

7. WORLD OF WARCRAFT SUFFERS THROUGH THE “CORRUPTED BLOOD INCIDENT”

World of Warcraft is known for its highly detailed challenges, but a 2005 programming oversight led to an in-game outbreak that was a lot more realistic than either designers or players saw coming. At the time, Blizzard Entertainment had just added a new instanced dungeon area to the game that featured a monster capable of infecting player characters with a very damaging, spell-and-potion-proof plague that wasn’t supposed to leave that area.

It was soon discovered, however, that players could transmit the disease to other player characters and even some non-player ones after teleporting back to the game’s capital city—and an outbreak in the thousands ensued. But it was, at least, a learning experience: The “Corrupted Blood Incident” ended up providing a window for disease and terrorism researchers into crowd mentalities and self-preservation behaviors, with Tufts researchers saying the simulated outbreak “raised the possibility for valuable scientific content to be gained from this unintentional game error.”

8. THE MARS POLAR LANDER THINKS IT’S LANDED, PLUMMETS FROM 130 FEET UP

NASA’s exploration of Mars hit another bug-induced stumbling block on December 3, 1999, when time had almost come for its Polar Lander to get settled on the planet. After atmospheric entry, it was supposed to jettison its solar panels and cruise-stage equipment, release its dual Deep Space 2 microprobes, and make a controlled landing on its supportive retrorockets the rest of the way down. Instead, the spacecraft’s computer seemingly interpreted forceful mid-air vibrations on the lander’s legs—likely caused by turbulence—as evidence it had set foot on Mars. So, at around 130 feet above the Martian surface, the $120 million (before launch vehicle), car-sized bundle of technology turned its boosters off and landed with a splat.

9. A TRADING GLITCH LOSES KNIGHT CAPITAL $440 MILLION IN 45 MINUTES

On August 1, 2012, a software glitch caused computers belonging to Jersey City-based Knight Capital Group to buy and sell shares of stocks unchecked for 45 minutes after the stock market opened. The company was forced to sell off its erroneously purchased shares the next day, losing a staggering $440 million. According to a statement released by the company, the event “severely impacted” its capital base (a pool of funds the investment firm used in its daily business of buying and selling) and left it “actively pursuing its strategic and financing alternatives.”

According to historians, modern society can learn a lot from the myriad of ways people put food on the table during the Great Depression. While some people raised livestock and grew their own fruits and vegetables, others had to stretch every dollar and pinch every penny to get the most food for their buck during hard economic times. Here are eight recipes that might seem strange today but were regular features at mealtime in the Depression Era. For more recipes from that time, pick up A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression.

1. POOR MAN’S MEAL

During the Great Depression, potatoes and hot dogs were very inexpensive, so many meals included either or both ingredients. In this video, 91-year-old Clara—who lived through the Depression—walks viewers through the process of making the Poor Man’s Meal: peel and cube a potato, then fry it in a pan with oil and chopped onions until they brown and soften. Then add slices of hot dog, cook a few minutes more, and serve.

2. CREAMED CHIPPED BEEF

Made with dried and salted beef, Creamed Chipped Beef was an easy and cheap dish that originated in Eastern Pennsylvania Dutch Country, New Jersey, and the Mid-Atlantic. To make if yourself, melt 2 tablespoons of butter in a pot over a medium heat and add 2 tablespoons of flour to make a roux. Slowly whisk in 1.5 cups of milk until it thickens and boils. Later add 8 ounces of dried beef (like Hormel). Serve over toast.

Affectionately called S.O.S. (“Sh*t on a Shingle” or “Save Our Stomachs”), Creamed Chipped Beef on Toast was also a staple of the U.S. military during World War I and especially World War II.

3. HOOVER STEW

Hoovervilles—shantytowns that sprang up during the Depression—weren’t the only things named after our 31st president, who had the misfortune to be elected just before the Crash. Hoover Stew was the name given to the soup from soup kitchens or similarly thin broths. One recipe calls for cooking a 16-ounce box of noodles like macaroni or spaghetti. While that’s on the stove, slice hot dogs into round shapes. Drain the pasta when it’s almost done and return to the pot; drop in the sliced hot dogs. Add two cans of stewed tomatoes and one can of corn or peas (with liquid) to the pot. Bring the mixture to a boil and then simmer until the pasta is finished cooking. No need to use corn or peas; you can substitute those veggies for anything canned and inexpensive.

4. EGG DROP SOUP

Here’s Clara’s recipe for Egg Drop Soup: Peel and dice a potato and an onion. Slowly brown them in a pot with oil until soft, then add bay leaves and salt and pepper. Once browned, add half a pot of water to the mix to make broth. Simmer on the stove and add more salt and pepper to taste until the potatoes are cooked. While boiling, crack two eggs into the pot and stir until scrambled. Add two more eggs into the soup, so the yolk hardens. Add cheese to finish it off. Once completed, serve the Egg Drop Soup over toast.

5. CORNED BEEF LUNCHEON SALAD

In the 1930s, gelatin was considered a modern, cutting edge food. Dishes like Corned Beef Luncheon Salad—which consisted of canned corned beef, plain gelatin, canned peas, vinegar, lemon juice, and occasionally cabbage—were very popular and inexpensive to make. According to Andy Coe, the co-author of A Square Meal, the recipe was just “wrong in every possible way” when compared with today’s modern tastes and palate.

6. FROZEN FRUIT SALAD

Served during the holiday season as a special treat, Frozen Fruit Salad was made with canned fruit cocktail (or your favorite canned fruit), egg yolks, honey, and whipping cream.

7. SPAGHETTI WITH CARROTS AND WHITE SAUCE

One of the dishes Eleanor Roosevelt recommended and promoted with the development of Home Economics in schools and colleges during the Great Depression was Spaghetti with Boiled Carrots and White Sauce. It was spaghetti cooked until mushy (about 25 minutes) and mixed with boiled carrots. The white sauce was made from milk, flour, salt, butter or margarine, and a little bit of pepper. After mixing, pour into a tray and bake to make a casserole.

8. PRUNE PUDDING

Although he had a taste for fancy meals, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was served a humble seven-and-a-half-cent lunch, which included deviled eggs in tomato sauce, mashed potatoes, coffee, and, for dessert, prune pudding. Roosevelt’s White House ate modestly in “an act of culinary solidarity with the people who were suffering,” Jane Ziegelman, the co-author of A Square Meal, told The New York Times.