Category: Bazaar News

As the kids head off to summer camp, many of them will partake in the timeless tradition of trying to get their friends to pee themselves by slipping their hand into some warm water. Does this actually work, or have generations of campers wasted their efforts?

We can’t say for sure. There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that suggests the prank works reliably, but, as the popular saying goes, the plural of anecdote is not data. Some friend of a friend who swears this happened to him at camp decades ago doesn’t really count for much. To test things out in a controlled environment, the MythBusters once tried the trick on each other and a crew member in a lab with sleep-monitoring equipment and moisture alarms in the beds. Their results were less than impressive: zero wet beds (to be fair, though, a sample size of three isn’t great).

If the trick does work, it would rely on the power of suggestion. We’ve talked before about how having to pee when you hear the sound of running water is a kind of conditioned response, spurred by the unconscious connection we make between the sound and the act. Wet hands are associated with urination through hand washing, which you do after relieving yourself, and there don’t seem to be many issues with people losing control of their bladders other times they get their hands in some warm water. 

There is such a thing called “immersion diuresis,” which is urination brought on by temperature and pressure changes from immersing the body in water—this is why swimming makes you have to pee—but research suggests that whole limbs or the whole body needs to go under water for this mechanism to work, and a single hand isn’t enough.

A version of this story originally ran in 2013; it has been updated for 2023.

Language is so deeply embedded in almost every aspect of the way we interact with the world that it’s hard to imagine what it would be like not to have it. What if we didn’t have names for things? What if we didn’t have experience making statements, asking questions, or talking about things that hadn’t actually happened? Would we be able to think? What would our thoughts be like?

The answer to the question of whether thought is possible without language depends on what you mean by “thought.” Can you experience sensations, impressions, feelings without language? Yes, and very few would argue otherwise. But there is a difference between being able to experience, say, pain or light, and possessing the concepts “pain” and “light.” Most would say true thought entails having the concepts.

Many artists and scientists, in describing their own inner processes while they work, say they do not use words to solve problems, but images. The autistic author Temple Grandin, in explaining how she thinks visually rather than linguistically, says that concepts for her are collections of images. Her concept of “dog,” for example, “is inextricably linked to every dog I’ve ever known. It’s as if I have a card catalog of dogs I have seen, complete with pictures, which continually grows as I add more examples to my video library.” Of course, Grandin has language, and knows how to use it, so it is hard to say how much of her thinking has been influenced by it, but it’s not unimaginable—and probably likely—that there are people who lack the ability to use language and think in the way she describes.

There is also evidence that deaf people cut off from language, spoken or signed, think in sophisticated ways before they have been exposed to language. When they later learn language, they can describe the experience of having had thoughts like those of the 15 year old boy who wrote in 1836, after being educated at a school for the deaf, that he remembered thinking in his pre-language days “that perhaps the moon would strike me, and I thought that perhaps my parents were strong, and would fight the moon, and it would fail, and I mocked the moon.” Also, the spontaneous sign languages developed by deaf students without language models, in places like Nicaragua, display the kind of thinking that goes far beyond mere sensory impression or practical problem solving.

However, while it appears that we can indeed think without language, it is also the case that there are certain kinds of thinking that are made possible by language. Language gives us symbols we can use to fix ideas, reflect on them, and hold them up for observation. It allows for a level of abstract reasoning we wouldn’t have otherwise. The philosopher Peter Carruthers has argued that there is a type of inner, explicitly linguistic thinking that allows us to bring our own thoughts into conscious awareness. We may be able to think without language, but language lets us know that we are thinking.

A version of this story ran in 2013; it has been updated for 2023.

You go about your day trying to be a good citizen, but you have no idea how many laws you’re probably breaking. Maybe you’re throwing snowballs, yelling at an umpire, or using high-tech equipment to make sure your shoes fit right. You know, everyday stuff. Just to be safe, check out this list of 45 weird laws—adapted from an episode of The List Show on YouTube—so you know what not to do.

You read that right. In 2009, Vermont made it illegal for groups like neighborhood associations to ban clotheslines owing to their perceived unsightliness. It became known as the “right to dry law.”

Wisconsin has a law that you cannot “propel any stone, brick, or other missile at any railroad train” lest you sustain a Class B misdemeanor charge. This could mean that you can technically drop a brick onto a railroad train, but no one’s ever tested it.

In Arizona, you cannot manufacture or distribute “imitation controlled substances,” which could be why they didn’t film Breaking Bad there. (It’s also because fake drugs can have unknown ingredients that can be deadlier than the real thing.)

Blasphemy laws used to be very common in the United States, but there are still some in existence, including in Michigan, where cursing God is a G**-d*** misdemeanor.

Allowing dogs to pursue big game [PDF] mammals, such as bears or bobcats, is illegal in California—unless you’re a federal, state, or local law enforcement official.

Bad news for ear-chompers: MMA contests in Utah cannot feature any biting.

If you’re over 16, it’s against to law to swear at players or officials during sporting events in Massachusetts or suffer a $50 fine. That must mean at the end of every Red Sox game, 37,000 people owe money.

In Maine, it’s illegal to check into a hotel using a false name. So no, you cannot register as Seymour Butts.

And speaking of false identities, at public places in Alabama, you cannot pretend to be a minister, nun, priest, or rabbi if you aren’t one, thereby making productions of The Sound of Music technically illegal. Unless the nuns are played by nuns, that is.

This one isn’t technically still on the books, but it just got changed. Thanks to a precocious 9-year-old boy, it’s finally legal to throw snowballs in a Colorado town known for its snow.

In Texas, officials aren’t allowed to be “excluded from holding office on account of his religious sentiments, provided he acknowledges the existence of a Supreme Being.” While it’s on the books, the provision is superseded by the U.S. Constitution and has never been enforced.

That’s great news if, like some, you find Bingo boring after four minutes.

In Indiana, you’re not allowed to sniff toxic vapors of any kind (including glue) with, “intent to cause a condition of intoxication, euphoria, excitement, exhilaration, stupefaction, or dulling of the senses.” So if you’re doing it for other reasons, that’s fine.

Spitzer. Giuliani. Weiner. Paterson. FDR. They all did something punishable by up to 90 days in jail and a $500 fine.

Rhode Island has a law against biting off the limbs of another person. No, you can’t cut them off, either, though presumably surgeons are exempted.

The Gateway Sexual Behavior Law in Tennessee prevents teachers from discussing anything that might be considered a “gateway” to sex. That includes kissing and hand-holding.

When they sang, “The eyes of Texas are upon you,” they meant that the state already has a pair and doesn’t need to buy yours. It’s not just eyes, either. It’s illegal to sell any of your bodily organs.

In South Carolina, dance halls are not allowed to be within a quarter-mile of a rural church or cemetery.

South Carolina also requires their dance halls to be closed on Sundays. It’s almost like they don’t like dancing.

As a matter of public safety, the state wanted to curb people’s ability to throw “hurricane parties,” which are apparently a thing in Florida. At least two counties have enacted the ban: In 2018, both Gulf County and Bay County locked down booze sales following Hurricane Michael.

It’s illegal to discount booze or do anything that might promote overindulgence, so Happy Hour is right out.

Fluoroscopes used to be common in shoe stores in the 1920s to 1950s to visualize the foot. Then people realized that maybe getting zapped with radiation for back-to-school shopping wasn’t the best idea. Washington banned it just in case anyone was going to be stubborn about it.

You literally cannot shoot fish in a barrel in Wyoming, where they have a law against fishing with firearms that specifically says you cannot “wound” the fish with a gun, either.

The state has a ban on playing R-rated movies specifically at drive-in theaters. Why? When pornographic and violent films grew more prevalent in the 1970s, some parents complained the imagery could be seen by kids from a distance. However, it’s probably unconstitutional and no one enforces it.

Attempting to “corrupt public morals” by arguing or drinking in public makes you guilty of a misdemeanor in Florida. How high is the bar here, exactly?

That’s during a calendar year, which presumably means you could spend 178 legal days crashing on your boat from October to March.

No word on whether Serious String is still allowed. Selling or using the silly stuff in public places comes with a $99 fine. The ban came after a 1995 Apple Harvest Festival, where children “wreaked havoc” with the goop.

Even if you’re really frustrated because you paid for those Cool Ranch Doritos, and you desperately need those Cool Ranch Doritos, you cannot take your frustrations out on the machine.

In Wisconsin, “no person may require an individual to undergo the implanting of a microchip.” Only in Wisconsin? Can we take this thing national?

This is probably the best idea when it comes to preserving the natural beauty of the region.

Planning to mesmerize people? Absolutely do not do it with your storefront signage or out on the street or at your theater’s ticket booth.

You’ll have to vanquish vampires somewhere else. You also can’t hop the fence to get in [PDF] or bring a picnic lunch.

The law says, “No person who is afflicted with a venereal disease shall marry in this state.” As you’re probably guessing, that’s a tough one to enforce, so if you get a marriage license without being detected, the marriage license still counts.

The hazards of using tanning beds must be posted conspicuously next to every single tanning bed.

Which makes sense. If you’re running away from an alligator in the library, you don’t want to have to stop to pull a door open.

So what’s even the point of visiting?

Sounds silly, but cyclists get why. A car door can be a hazard to anyone on two wheels.

Oregon also has a law preventing improper disposal of human waste while you’re on the road, so if you’re traveling with containers of urine through Oregon, don’t toss them out. (And no, you can’t gently set them down, either.)

You also aren’t supposed to hunt, shoot, play cards, or race that day. You also can’t promote or engage in a bear wrestling match (any day).

When the monarch butterflies make their annual pilgrimage to town, give them a wide berth. Look with your eyes, not with your hands, people.

EMS workers aren’t allowed to tend to pets: A bill was passed in 2022 to allow them to treat police dogs who are injured in the line of duty.

You can’t “recklessly” sell cat hair, either, nor “any product made in whole or in part” by your furry friends’ fur.

According to code 10.04.200, you can be fined $500 for your tire noise, so drive politely out there.

If you’re planning to rob a bank, you’ll get in double trouble if you’re wearing bullet-resistant gear during the stick-up.

Once that train enters Ohio, tequila for everybody [PDF].

A version of this story ran in 2013; it has been updated for 2023.

Not all authors’ book dedications are nice. Some—like these—are just plain mean.

“This is presented as a work of fiction and dedicated to nobody.”

Even in his first novel (which was semi-autobiographical—he worked as both a mail carrier and a clerk), Charles Bukowski felt no need to flatter anyone.

“I should like to blame the editors of Notes and Queries for rejecting the extremely concise and dignified query on the Martini I sent them and I should also like to blame the editor of the New York Times Book Review for failing to print my author’s query. May these editors find that their gin has turned to gasoline or may they drink too many Martinis and then swallow a toothpick, as Sherwood Anderson is said to have done.”

Authors are always thanking others for their help. Why shouldn’t they also blame others for their non-help?

“My first stepfather used to say that what I didn’t know would fill a book. Well, here it is.”

The acknowledgements section of Tobias Wolff’s memoir of a difficult adolescence with abusive stepfathers ends on a finely honed knifepoint.

“Let me note, finally, that most of the research for this book was done in the libraries of Harvard University, the size of whose holdings is matched only by the school’s determination to restrict access to them. I am delighted to have been able to use these resources, and it hardly matters that I was afforded this privilege only because the school thought I was someone else.”

Crediting the collections you used for your research is the honorable thing to do, even when packaged with a “screw you for trying to keep me from using them.”

E.E. Cummings wrote a book of poems that was turned down by 14 publishers. He finally published it under the title No Thanks. The dedication was a list of all the publishers who had rejected it, arranged in the shape of a funeral urn.

“I do not dedicate my book to any body; for I know nobody worth dedicating it to. I have no friends, no children, no wife, no home;—no relations, no well-wishers;—nobody to love, and nobody to care for. To whom shall I; to whom can I dedicate it? To my Maker! It is unworthy of him. To my countrymen? They are unworthy of me. For the men of past ages I have very little veneration; for those of the present, not at all. To whom shall I entrust it? Who will care for me, by to-morrow? Who will do battle for my book, when I am gone? Will posterity? Yea, posterity will do me justice. To posterity then—to the winds! I bequeath it! I devote it—as a Roman would his enemy, to the fierce and unsparing charities of another world – to a generation of spirits – to the shadowy and crowned potentates of hereafter. I—I—I have done – the blood of the red man is growing cold—farewell—farewell forever!”

This book of fiction was based on the story of a real Native American chief whose family was murdered by a band of white outlaws. The author (whose biography is titled A Down-East Yankee from the District of Maine) had a stubborn temperament that would never let him settle for just a “screw you” where a “screw you all” would do.

“To the First Mother who Brings up a Happy Child.”

Watson’s book, which advises against giving children unrealistic expectations by overindulging them with love, is written from the viewpoint that the recipient of his dedication does not yet exist, essentially rendering the dedication a “screw you” to all mothers.

A version of this story ran in 2013; it has been updated for 2023.

Since the 19th century, we’ve been learning our ABCs through the alphabet song sung to the same tune as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” But English isn’t the only alphabet, and not every alphabet will fit into that song. Here are some other songs from around the world to help them learn their ABCs.

The Swedish alphabet is almost the same as ours, but they’ve got three more letters to cram into the song (å, ä, ö). They leave out the w, which was grouped together with v by the Swedish Academy until 2006.

The Turkish alphabet doesn’t have q, w, or x, but it has six other letters that English doesn’t have, bringing the total to 29. This catchy song fits them all in nicely.

The Croatian alphabet has 30 letters. Here, the Bajka children’s choir sings them with impressive speed.

The Russian alphabet has 33 letters, but this song from Russian Sesame Street is so catchy, it doesn’t seem like so many.

The Malaysian language can be written with the Latin alphabet or in Jawi, a form of Arabic script. Here a group of cuties sings the Jawi “Alif Ba Ta.”

Written Thai has a complex relationship to the spoken language. Most consonants can be written in two different ways, indicating different tones. There are also additional marks for tones and for vowels. There are 44 consonants to memorize, and the task is made easier by associating each one with a word in which the sound is featured. So the first letter is ‘ko’ as in kai (chicken), the second is ‘kho’ as in khai (egg), and so on down through bottle, water buffalo, person, bell, snake, etc.

Amharic, the language of Ethiopia, is written with a script in which each character stands for a consonant+vowel syllable. These kids are singing a song to help them learn the 34 characters from the first vowel series. Once they have these down, the other 6 vowel series should be a piece of cake.

A version of this story ran in 2012; it has been updated for 2023.

In his movie 2012, Roland Emmerich’s 2009 love letter to the Mayan apocalypse, our heroes barely manage to escape Yellowstone National Park before it explodes beneath them. This not-so-subtle sci-fi sequence is actually based on something real: the Yellowstone supervolcano. What distinguishes this kind of volcano from regular volcanoes, and what will happen if—or when—it erupts?

There are four main types of volcanoes: Cinder cones, composite or stratovolcanoes, shield volcanoes, and lava domes, which all rise above the earth. But supervolcanoes like the one under Yellowstone are calderas: vast sunken areas formed when the volcano expels all of its magma, and the land comes back to rest in the empty chamber. These calderas can be as big as 60 miles across (the current Yellowstone caldera, which sits on several older calderas, measures about 30 miles by 45 miles).

When Mount St. Helens, a stratovolcano located in Washington, erupted in 1980, the event rated a 5 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) and expelled one cubic kilometer of ash. But supervolcanoes register 8 on the VEI and typically expel 10,000 times that volume of magma and ash. The most recent Yellowstone eruption, which occurred 630,000 years ago, released 240 cubic miles of volcanic debris.

The Yellowstone supervolcano is just one of several scattered around the globe. An incomplete list includes Taupo in New Zealand, which last erupted in the 3rd century CE. Before that was a supereruption of Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia, which occurred 74,000 years ago. There‘s a supervolcano near Pompeii, and one in Chile, too. There may be more we haven‘t yet discovered.

Below Yellowstone‘s surface—in some places as little as 5 or 6 miles deep—is a reservoir of solid rock and magma. Below that is a 45-mile-wide plume of molten rock that comes from at least 410 miles beneath the Earth‘s surface. This is what fuels Yellowstone‘s incredible geysers and geothermal pools. Bob Smith, who first described Yellowstone as “a living, breathing caldera” in 1979, says in his book Windows into the Earth that if the caldera were to erupt, “devastation would be complete and incomprehensible.”

First there would be swarms of earthquakes, then a huge blast that would wipe Yellowstone off the map. Clouds of ash and gas would burn everything in their paths. Ash would cover most of North America, destroying food sources. Some speculate that a supereruption from the Yellowstone caldera would instantly kill 87,000 people. Others say that such an eruption would lower the temperature of the Earth by at least 21 degrees, and might even block out the sun.

One study determined that if or when Yellowstone next erupts, it will probably be centered in one of three parallel fault zones running north-northwest across the national park.

Still, there‘s probably no reason to worry. Chances are that a supereruption won‘t occur in our lifetimes. Number crunchers have determined that only 1.4 supereruptions occur every million years, and, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, the odds of Yellowstone erupting are slim: just one in 730,000, or 0.00014 percent, a year.

A version of this story ran in 2012; it has been updated for 2023.

In the typical Christmastime narrative of Jesus Christ’s birth, he’s born in a manger and visited by three wise men. They’re sometimes referred to as kings from the East or the Orient, and sometimes as Magi, and they come bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

That first one is something most people are familiar with. The other two are a little more obscure.

Frankincense and myrrh are the dried sap of trees, also known as resin. Frankincense comes from the deciduous trees of the genus Boswellia, and myrrh from some species in the genus Commiphora, all of which are found on the Horn of Africa and the coastal countries of the Arabian Peninsula.

Extracting the sap for frankincense and myrrh is essentially the same process: Harvesters make a vertical cut in the tree’s trunk, piercing the sap reservoirs inside the bark. The sap oozes out and drips down the trunk and is left to dry and harden. After a few days or weeks, harvesters come back and collect the lumps of resin.

Both resins have traditionally been used as incense and medicine. Frankincense has a woody, fruity smell that is activated when it’s burned; it perfumed ancient Roman homes, archaic Egyptian rituals, and modern Catholic masses. In antiquity, physicians used frankincense to treat ailments ranging from poisoning to diarrhea to leprosy. In some Asian traditional medicines it’s a treatment for indigestion and relieving inflammation.

Myrrh, meanwhile, has a medicinal, somewhat bitter smell when it’s burned. It is an astringent (a substance that causes tissues to constrict), so it was often used to dress wounds. Today, it’s still used to prevent and treat gum disease, and it sometimes shows up in toothpastes and mouthwashes.

Myrrh can also be added to alcoholic drinks and wine. It flavors some brands of fernet, the Italian liqueur that’s an unofficial national drink of Argentina.

Have you got a Big Question you’d like us to answer? If so, let us know by emailing us at bigquestions@mentalfloss.com.

A version of this story was published in 2012; it has been updated for 2023.

You know it’s a distress signal, but what does “SOS” actually stand for? A lot of people think it’s an abbreviation for “save our souls” or “save our ship.” But those phrases are backronyms. The letters don’t actually stand for anything.

In fact, the signal isn’t even really supposed to be three individual letters. It’s just a continuous Morse code string of three dots, three dashes, and three dots all run together with no spaces or full stops (…—…). Since three dots form the letter S and three dashes form an O in International Morse Code, though, the signal came to be called “SOS” for the sake of convenience. That connection has led to the letters coming into their own as a visual distress signal divorced from Morse code, and those in need of rescue sometimes spell them out on the ground to be seen from above.

You could also break down the string into the Morse code equivalents of IJS, SMB, and VTB if you wanted to.

So why use that specific string of dots and dashes if there’s no meaning to it? Because it was the best way to get the job done.

When wireless radiotelegraph machines first made their way onto ships around the turn of the 20th century, sailors in danger needed a way to attract attention, signal distress, and ask for help. They needed a unique signal that would transmit clearly and quickly and wouldn’t be confused for other communications. At first, different organizations and countries had their own “in-house” distress signals. The U.S. Navy used “NC,” which was the maritime flag signal for distress from the International Code of Signals. The Marconi Company, which leased its equipment and telegraph operators to various ships, used “CQD.”  The “German Regulations for the Control of Spark Telegraphy” of 1905 mandated that all German operators use “…—…”.

Having these multiple distress signals was confusing and potentially dangerous. It meant that a ship in distress in foreign waters had a language barrier to overcome with would-be rescuers, even if using International Morse Code. Because of this and other issues, various countries decided to get together and discuss the idea of laying down some international regulations for radiotelegraph communications. In 1906, the International Wireless Telegraph Convention convened in Berlin, and delegates attempted to establish an international standard distress call. Marconi’s “-.-.–.–..”, and “………-..-..-..” (“SSSDDD”), which Italy had proposed at a previous conference, were deemed too cumbersome.  Germany’s “…—…”, though, could be sent quickly and easily and was hard to misinterpret. It was chosen as the international distress signal for the nations who met at the conference, and went into effect on July 1, 1908.

The first recorded use of “SOS” as a distress signal occurred just over a year later, in August 1909. The wireless operators on the SS Arapahoe sent the signal when the ship was disabled by a broken propeller off the coast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.

Not everyone got on board with the new standard as quickly, though. The Marconi Company was particularly reluctant to give up on “CQD.” The Marconi operators on board the Titanic initially just sent that signal after the ship struck an iceberg, until another operator suggested they try the new “SOS” signal, too.

A version of this story ran in 2012; it has been updated for 2023.

The reason we’ve dubbed a place of sellers peddling their second-hand stuff a flea market has turned out to be another in a long line of etymologies that doesn’t have one clear-cut answer, but a few plausible, and interesting, suggested explanations.

One idea historians have is that flea market comes from the the outdoor bazaars of Paris, some of which have been around for hundreds of years. According to the association that runs one of the markets today, the term first sprang up in the 1880s when an unknown bargain hunter looked upon the market with its rags and old furniture and dubbed it le marché aux puces (“market of fleas”), because of shoppers’ perceptions that some of the more time-worn wares sold there carried the little bloodsuckers. The first recorded appearance in English that the Oxford English Dictionary lists, in G.S. Dougherty’s 1922 book In Europe, makes reference to this origin: “It is called the‘Flea’ Market because there are so many second hand articles sold of all kinds that they are believed to gather fleas.”

Pascal Tréguer at Word Histories has traced the English phrase back further than that, to a letter from Denmark published in an 1887 New York Sun article that described the last day of a flea market. “I don’t know whether, in this article, flea market is the calque of French marché aux puces or a translation of Danish loppemarked (loppe meaning flea),” Tréguer writes. “According to the Danish dictionary Den Danske Ordbog, loppemarked is either from German Flohmarkt (Floh meaning flea) or from French marché aux puces. The origin of Flohmarkt is unclear according to the German dictionary Duden.”

Another possible origin has its roots in the same French markets, but with a twist on the words and meaning. As the city planners of Paris began laying down its broad avenues and constructing new buildings, some of the side streets and alleyways that were home to the second-hand outdoor markets and stalls were demolished. The merchants were forced to take their wares and set up shop elsewhere. Once reestablished, the exiled bazaars came to be known, in English, as flee markets, which somehow got turned into flea later on (though no one seems to have an explanation for why).

A third explanation comes from colonial America. The Dutch traders who settled New Netherlands (present-day New York) had an outdoor market they called the Vlaie (sometimes spelled as Vly, or Vlie) Market, named from the Dutch word for “swamp” and referencing the market’s location on what was once a salt marsh. English speakers pronounced the word with an f up front (and sometimes a long l on the end), and the Fly/Flea Market and other places like it eventually all became flea markets.

A version of this story ran in 2012; it has been updated for 2023.

A longstanding urban legend goes like this: During the space race of the 1960s, NASA spent millions developing a fancy “space pen” that could be used in zero gravity … but the Soviets just used a pencil. This story resonates with us because NASA did actually spend piles of money on writing utensils in space—in 1965 they paid $128 per mechanical pencil, according to NASA historians (for the record, the pencils had high-strength outer casings, but the writing guts were just regular mechanical pencils). It just seems logical that the thrifty Soviets would use a simpler, smarter solution. But the story about the government-funded space pen and Soviets using pencils instead is just plain wrong—both space programs used the Fisher Space Pen, and neither paid anything to develop it. Let’s dig into the real history here.

The traditional ballpoint pen relies partially on gravity to get ink out of the cartridge, onto the ball, and ultimately onto paper. Within the cartridge, there is a reservoir of ink (you can see this in that clear-plastic “stick” in the middle of a typical Bic pen). But without gravity, there is no force to push the ink towards the ball—it just floats freely in the cartridge. This is why traditional ballpoint pens don’t write properly upside down (at least after the first few strokes) and often fail to write on vertical surfaces—the ink loses contact with the ball.

Americans and Soviets actually did use pencils in space, before the Space Pen came around. Americans favored mechanical pencils, which produced a fine line but presented hazards when the pencil lead tips broke (and if you’ve ever used a mechanical pencil, you know that this happens a lot). That bit of graphite floating around the space capsule could get into someone’s eye, or even find its way into machinery or electronics, causing an electrical short or other problems. And if there’s one thing Houston didn’t need, it was more astronauts calling up with problems.

The Soviet space program used grease pencils, which don’t have breakage problems—to access more of the writing wax, cosmonauts simply peeled away another layer of paper. The problem with a grease pencil is that it’s imprecise and smudgy—it’s a lot like writing with a crayon. The peeled-away paper also created waste, and bits of paper floating around a Soyuz capsule were nearly as annoying as bits of graphite floating around an Apollo capsule.

The final mark against pencils has to do with fire. Any flammable material in a high-oxygen environment is a hazard, as we all learned after the terrible fire on Apollo 1. After that tragedy, NASA sought to minimize the use of flammable materials in space capsules—and every form of pencil (traditional, mechanical, or grease) involved some amount of flammable material, even if it was just the graphite.

Image courtesy of Cpg100/Wikimedia Commons

In 1965, engineer Paul C. Fisher patented a new pen design that changed everything. His Fisher Pen Company reportedly spent $1 million of its own money to develop what was first called the “Anti-Gravity” Space Pen, and later simply the “Space Pen.” Fisher happened to perfect his invention around the time that NASA had its $128 pencil problem, so Fisher capitalized on that bad press and publicized his heavy-duty pen as the obvious solution. And it worked.

Fisher’s Space Pen featured a series of technological improvements, making it suitable for use not just in space, but in other demanding environments. Its biggest innovation was its ink capsule—pressurized nitrogen forced the ink to flow, enabling the pen to write upside-down, in zero gravity, in a vacuum, or even underwater. The nitrogen was separated from the ink by a floating barrier, which served to keep the ink in the writing end of the capsule. The ink was itself different from typical materials; it had a thixotropic (highly viscous) consistency that resisted evaporation, and kept the ink stationary until the ball moved, at which point it turned into a more typical fluid.

To counterbalance the pressurized ink flow, Fisher also included a precision roller ball made of tungsten carbide, positioned to prevent leakage. The pens were made entirely of metal except for the ink, which reportedly had a flash point of 200° C—enough to meet NASA’s strict flammability requirements.

Fisher delivered samples of the Space Pen to NASA in 1965. NASA tested the pen to verify Fisher’s claims, and ultimately approved a later version for use starting in 1967. Wanting to avoid the earlier scandal about paying excessive amounts for pencils, NASA received a bulk discount for the pens, reportedly paying just $2.39 per pen for an order of 400 units in 1968. The Soviet space agency also purchased 100 pens. NASA astronauts began using the Space Pen on Apollo 7 in 1968. By 1969, both the American and Soviet space programs had Fisher Space Pens in space—and Fisher trumpeted that success in his Space Pen marketing, which continues today. (Among other odd achievements, a Space Pen was used on the Russian space station Mir in the mid-1990s for a promotion on QVC, as the first product “sold from space.”)

For more on Fisher and his Space Pen, check out the timeline of Fisher Space Pen history, Dwayne A. Day’s excellent history of the pen, the Snopes article about the pen, or read more about Fisher and his history in politics. They’re also still for sale.

In 1841, the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay wrote, “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” That observation formed the basis of his social science classic, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, and partly describes the five historical manias below—which came on disturbingly fast, and disappeared just as rapidly.

In 1374, dozens of villages in present-day western Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, and northeastern France were visited by an unexplained dancing plague. By the hundreds, villagers took to the streets leaping, jerking, and hopping to music no one else could hear. They barely ate or slept, and danced while crying out for deliverance from their torment. Some danced for days until they perished.

The plague disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived. But in July 1518, in Strasbourg, a woman named Frau Troffea began dancing involuntarily, and within a week, she was joined by 34 people; by the end of the month, the crowd had swelled to 400. Dozens perished, having literally danced themselves into heart attacks, strokes, and exhaustion. And, just as before, it simply went away.

Historians, psychologists and scientists have tried to unravel its cause. One theory was that the dancers had eaten bread tainted by ergot, a mold that grows on the stalks of damp rye. When consumed, it can cause convulsions, shaking, and hallucinations, among other symptoms. (Ergot poisoning has been proposed as the force behind the strange behaviors leading to the Salem Witch Trials, though that theory is controversial.)

In his 2009 book A Time to Dance, a Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518, John Waller notes that all contemporary accounts suggest the sufferers were dancing, not convulsing. He theorizes that the dancing plagues were mass psychogenic illnesses, sparked by fear and depression. The manias of 1374 and 1518 were preceded by periods of devastating famine, crop failures, dramatic floods, and other catastrophes. Anxiety, fear, depression, and superstition—in particular, the belief that God was sending down plagues to persecute the guilty—made people susceptible to falling into a kind of involuntary trance state.

And dancing plagues were the calling card of St. Vitus, an early Christian martyr venerated with dance parties, meaning that the idea was already in the victims’ heads. All it took was one person to start, and then everyone else followed.

When dozens of students at a girls’ boarding school in Tanganyika (now Tanzania) began laughing uncontrollably, forcing the school to shut down for two months, it wasn’t a joke.

The laughing epidemic began on January 30, 1962, at the school in a rural village in northwest Tanganyika, according to a 1963 report in the Central African Medical Journal. It started with a bout of uncontrollable laughing among three pupils, which turned into a crying jag attended by anxiety, the fear of being chased, and in some cases, violence when the girls were restrained. The symptoms spread through the school, apparently transmitted by contact with an infected person; onset was sudden, and lasted from a few hours to 16 days.

The school was forced to shut down in March after more than half the students—95 out of 159—were affected. And then, 10 days after the closure, the phenomenon emerged in a village 55 miles away and affected more than 200 people. The disease then spread through the countryside; each time, the vector was a person who had either been at the closed girls’ school or had come in contact with them.

There was nothing physically wrong with the affected people. They exhibited no fevers or convulsions, and their blood work produced nothing interesting. Dr. Christian Hempelmann, a professor at Texas A&M University who studies humor, calls the laughing epidemic a mass psychogenic illness.

Most people like to take a holiday now and again. Some people, however, just can’t stop. Dromomania describes the compulsive urge to travel, and it was all the rage in France between 1886 and 1909. The man who exemplified dromomania for the European medical establishment was Jean-Albert Dadas, a gas-fitter from Bordeaux. Dadas was admitted to the Saint-Andre Hospital in 1886 after he had just returned from a truly epic journey—and could not really recall where he’d been.

Dadas was exhausted, naturally, but also confused, vague, and foggy. A doctor at the hospital, Philipe Auguste Tissié, managed to piece together his story and published the case report as “Les aliénés voyageurs” (“The Mad Travelers”). Dadas’s compulsive traveling allegedly began after he deserted from the French army near Mons in 1881. From there, he walked east to Prague, then to Berlin, then through East Prussia, and finally to Moscow. There, he was arrested—a czar had just been assassinated and Dadas had the misfortune of being mistaken for a member of the responsible political movement—and forced to march to exile in Turkey. In Constantinople, he was somehow rescued by the French consulate and put on the road to Vienna, where he again took up work as a gas-fitter.

Dadas’s story publicized several other cases of dromomania in France, Russia, Italy, and Germany at the time, but the epidemic seemed to die out by 1909, when psychologists started to actively investigate it. Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking, author of Mad Travelers: Reflections on the Reality of Transient Mental Illness, suggested that the compulsion to travel was an instance of dissociative fugue, a type of dissociative disorder in which a person experiences amnesia and ends up in a place with no memory of how they got there.

People with koro have an irrational fear that their sex organs are retracting into their bodies. (Western medical literature often uses the term genital retraction syndrome.) A 2023 study in the journal Health Psychology Research reports at least 12 koro epidemics since 1969. Psychologists consider koro a “culture-bound” syndrome, meaning that it’s more prevalent in societies that place importance on sexual virility and reproductive ability, and where sexual performance is linked to social and marital value. Symptoms include severe anxiety (unsurprisingly) and the feeling of impending death or loss of sexual ability.

Most of the cases have occurred in Africa, China, and Southeast Asia. A koro outbreak in 1967 in Singapore affected about 500 people and lasted roughly 10 days. According to a later report in the Singapore Medical Journal, “It became a common sight to see men appearing at admission rooms with chopsticks and other mechanical aids tied to their sex organs to prevent retraction” [PDF].

Women have experienced koro and often manifest the fear that their breasts or vulvas are disappearing into their bodies, but for obvious reasons, men are the most likely sufferers. The epidemics tend to follow periods of social tension or widespread anxiety, but in some societies, the causes are more mythical. Chinese folklore warns that female fox spirits can steal a man’s virility, and some African cultures have blamed witchcraft.

From about 1400 to 1700, in convents across Europe, epidemics of “motor hysteria” erupted among the nuns. Women allegedly exhibited signs of demonic possession, others acted out in sexually disturbing ways, and the inhabitants of one convent took to mewling like cats and trying to claw their way up trees.

One of the final outbreaks even ended in death. In 1749, a woman at a convent in Würzburg, Germany, was beheaded on suspicion of being a witch after a period of mass fainting, foaming at the mouth, and screaming. Usually, however, these episodes ended in someone calling in a priest for an exorcism.

Sociologist Robert E. Bartholomew attributes the waves of medieval motor hysteria to factors common to the isolated religious communities [PDF]:

“Young girls typically were coerced by elders into joining these socially isolating religious orders, practicing rigid discipline in confined, all-female living quarters. Their plight included forced vows of chastity and poverty. Many endured bland near-starvation diets, repetitious prayer rituals, and lengthy fasting intervals. Punishment for even minor transgressions included flogging and incarceration. The hysterical fits appeared under the strictest administrators.”

The motor hysteria usually occurred as a culmination of stress and anxiety building up over time in the pressure-cooker environment of the convents.

A version of this article was originally published in 2012 and has been updated for 2024.

Think all there is to taxidermy is stuffing an animal? Think again. Since the days of William Hornaday and Carl Akeley, taxidermy has been a scientific art: It requires practitioners not only to take accurate measurements and photos and make traces of the animals they’d like to mount, but to study the anatomy of those animals—all for the purpose of creating a specimen that is true to life. Read on for 12 things you might not know about the history, development, and practice of taxidermy.

They mean “arrangement” and “skin,” respectively. Some say the first person to use the word taxidermy was Louis Dufresne of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, who wrote about it in the 1803 reference book Nouveau Dictionnaire d’Histoire Naturelle, but according to Merriam-Webster, the word appeared at least three years earlier in an ornithology book written by a zoologist named François Marie Daudin.

Humans have been preserving animals for thousands of years—just look at ancient Egypt’s mummified cats. But as conservator Amandine Péquignot writes in The History of Taxidermy: Clues for Preservation [PDF], they “should not be regarded as true taxidermy,” because taxidermy and mummification had different goals and techniques—for instance, “Mummies were created in a religious context, unlike taxidermy, which developed from a curiosity about nature.”

According to Péquignot, taxidermy began to emerge in the 16th century, when Europeans started to mount the skins of various animals and developed methods and chemicals to preserve them. As the years went on, better methods emerged, and by the 19th century, taxidermy was well established in scientific circles.

In 1851, London hosted the Great Exhibition, which featured around 100,000 objects from over 15,000 contributors—including a lot of taxidermy. The Indian displays included a taxidermied elephant (though that animal was actually an African elephant found in a nearby museum). Also present was J.A. Hancock’s taxidermy, which the Official Catalogue noted “will go far towards raising the art of taxidermy to a level with other arts which have hitherto held higher pretensions.” And it did—in the years following the Great Exhibition, taxidermy became a very popular pastime; even a young Theodore Roosevelt took lessons. It got to the point that Victorians would anthropomorphize their taxidermy, dressing stuffed animals in clothes and working them into tableaus like the ones created by Walter Potter. They would also sometimes produce creatures with extra heads or legs.

Captain James Cook embarked on a number of exploratory expeditions around the South Pacific, where taxidermy was used to preserve animal specimens. For example, according to Royal Museums Greenwich, it’s said that the captain brought the first kangaroo skin—which was supposedly killed by a dog belonging to naturalist Sir Joseph Banks—to London in 1771. Bird specimens obtained on Cook’s expeditions can be seen at institutions like the UK’s Natural History Museum.

John Edmonstone had learned the skill from naturalist Charles Waterton, who brought him on expeditions. Edmonstone charged Darwin a guinea an hour to learn his services; Darwin wrote to his sister that Edmonstone “gained his livelihood by stuffing birds, which he did excellently.” Without the skills taught to him by Edmonstone, Darwin likely wouldn’t have been able to nab a job on the HMS Beagle.

This meant that the models were often disfigured. In fact, mounts from those days skewed how we imagined creatures like the long-extinct dodo for years. (The only soft tissue specimen of a dodo, which resides in the collections at UK’s Oxford University Museum of Natural History, continues to teach us new things about the bird.) Today, taxidermists can purchase a mannequin—which they can sculpt to achieve the position they want, then stretch and sew the skin over it—or create their own using old methods, like the Victorian-era process of winding the body shape out of string.

When Captain John Hunter sent the first pelt and sketch of a platypus back to England in 1798, many assumed it was a hoax—that someone had sewn a duck’s bill to the coat of a beaver. George Shaw, author of The Naturalist’s Miscellany: Or, Coloured Figures Of Natural Objects; Drawn and Described Immediately From Nature, reportedly took scissors to the skin to check for stitches.

First place was awarded to taxidermist William Temple Hornaday’s A Fight in the Tree-Tops, which depicted two male Bornean orangutans fighting over a female. According to Melissa Milgrom in her book Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy, the scene, which was scientifically accurate, changed the purpose of taxidermy—it inspired other taxidermists to aim for accuracy in their mounts, too.

Carl Akeley (for whom the Akeley Hall of African Mammals at New York’s American Museum of Natural History is named) created the first habitat diorama in America—which portrayed muskrats—in 1889 for the Milwaukee Public Museum.

Akeley’s obsessive method of preserving one elephant was detailed by his wife in her memoir, The Wilderness Lives Again. Milgrom sums it up in Still Life:

“After the elephant was shot in the bush, he shaded it under a tarp to slow it from decomposing. After he photographed it for reference, he took detailed measurements with a tape measure and calipers, compensating for variations that make a dead animal different from a living one, such as deflated lungs, a limp trunk, and flaccid muscles. Next he cased the skull and leg bones in plaster and made a death mask of the face to capture its fine musculature. … Akeley skinned animals like a Park Avenue plastic surgeon. All his incisions minimized future seams, so they’d disappear when the animal was assembled later. The legs were cut on the inside; the back was cut longitudinally along the spine; the head was cast, cut off. Once skinned, the elephant was fleshed … It took Akeley and his team of porters four to five days to remove and prepare the thick, 2000-pound hide, using small knives so they would not mar the skin.”

Back at the museum, Akeley tanned the hide in a 12-week-long process that turned the 2.5-inch thick skin into quarter-inch leather. He then made an outline of the elephant on the floor and built its internal frame—using steel, wood, and the elephant’s bones—on top of it. He covered the frame with wire mesh, and then clay which he sculpted to recreate the elephant’s muscles. After placing the skin on this form and making sure the clay accurately replicated “every fold and wrinkle,” Milgrom says, he cast the form in plaster to make a lightweight mannequin, which is what he eventually stretched the skin over. This is the process he used to create the elephants in the Akeley African Hall of Mammals.

In addition to his obsessive eye for detail—he even invented the first portable movie camera to capture footage of animals in the wild, to better create more accurate taxidermy mounts—Akeley was also a badass: In one of many adventures, he killed a leopard with his bare hands.

In those days, competition was fierce, so methods of preservation differed from taxidermist to taxidermist and were closely guarded—some even went to the grave without revealing their secrets. Fun fact: As a teen, future president Theodore Roosevelt—who was an avid hunter and nature lover—tried to purchase a pound of arsenic for taxidermy purposes at a store in Liverpool and was refused. “I was informed that I must bring a witness to prove that I was not going to commit murder, suicide or any such [dreadful] thing, before I could have it!’ he wrote in his diary. (An adult apparently did vouch for him.)

In taxidermy, a specimen is an exact replica of the animal as it appeared in the wild; an example of a trophy is a deer head mounted on the wall.

According to Milgrom, in these categories, taxidermists attempt to create an animal without using any of its actual parts—making an eagle using turkey feathers, for example, or creating a realistic panda using bearskin—or even recreating extinct species based on scientific data.

When the rhino that belonged to Louis XIV and Louis XV was stabbed to death by a revolutionary in 1793, its skin was varnished and stretched over a frame of wooden hoops. At that time, it was the largest animal to undergo a modern taxidermy process. The skin is on display at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris; its bones are displayed separately.

A version of this story ran in 2012; it has been updated for 2023.

Picture this: You’re sitting on your couch in the dark alone, watching a scary movie. The killer is walking toward an unsuspecting victim, then suddenly jumps out at her. In that moment, the hairs on your body stand up, and you get a shiver down your spine. When you go for a walk on a crisp morning, the same thing happens. When the music swells during your favorite song, you get the shivers again, this time with the little goosebumps on your arms that appear when you get that sensation. What is going on?

There’s a good reason for shivers and goosebumps: They’re your body’s response to emotion or stress. We got this from our animal ancestors: When they were cold, the hair on their bodies would stand up—the movement of the arrector pili muscle would cause the skin to contract, raising each hair—to provide an extra layer of insulation.

This response is also in play when animals feel threatened; their natural reaction is to try to look bigger than their attacker, so their skin and hair expand to play up that effect. The part of the brain called the hypothalamus is what controls this reaction.

Shivering can also be a sign that the body is attempting to warm itself up. According to a post on McGill University’s Office for Science and Society blog, “Shivering is our body’s way of raising its core temperature to bring it back to a state of homeostasis … If body temperature dips below the normal 98.6° F (37° Celsius), we will start shivering, which will then cause muscles to contract and then relax very rapidly, thereby expending energy to warm up the whole body. These muscle contractions cause limbs to shake and also teeth to chatter. Shivering, similar to blood pressure and heart rate, is an automatic and totally involuntary function that the body performs to regulate itself.”

So why do goosebumps—also known as cutis anserina or piloerection—appear when it’s not for a functional purpose like looking larger or creating insulation? It’s because our emotions are also connected with the hypothalamus, so sometimes goosebumps are just our body reacting to our brain’s signals of intense emotion.

When we feel things like love, fear, or sadness, the hypothalamus sends a signal to our bodies that produces adrenaline in our blood. The signal triggers the arrector pili muscles to contract, and then we have goosebumps caused by emotion. The sudden adrenaline rush may also cause sweaty palms, tears, increased blood pressure, or shivers. That shiver down your spine goes goes by several names: Some call it frisson, or “shiver” in French, especially when music is involved; others go with terms like aesthetic chills [PDF] or psychogenic shivers.

When we watch movies or listen to music and get shivers, it’s a mixture of subjective emotions toward the film or song and physiological arousal. If we watch a movie or hear a song we get excited about, or one that makes us sad, the hypothalamus reacts to the sudden change in emotion and we physically feel the shiver along our spine.

Now that you know why we get shivers down our spines (even when we’re not cold), read up on people who can control their goosebumps.

A version of this story ran in 2012; it has been updated for 2023.

These 17 synonyms for sex were used often enough in 19th-century England to earn a place in the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, a book for upper-crust Britons who had no idea what members of the lower classes were talking about.

To say two people were engaged in amorous congress was by far the most polite option on the list. It often served as the definition for other, less discreet synonyms.

As in, “those two recently opened a basket-making shop.” Apparently the phrase stems from a method of making children’s stockings, in which knitting the heel is called basket-making.

As the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue puts it, this refers to one person on top of the other: “Rumor has it he found her bread and butter fashion with the neighbor.”

“Yeah, we had a brush once”: the emphasis here is on brevity. Just a fling, no big deal.

“They left together, so they’re probably at clicket.” This term was originally used only for foxes, but it became less specific as more and more phrases for doing it were needed. One definition from the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue maintains the term’s outdoorsy etymology: “the man and woman are copulating in the ditch.”

Aside from the obvious, this also comes from “making children,” because babies have faces.

There is probably no way to use this in seriousness or discreetly, but there you have it.

“Grounsils” are foundation timbers, so this phrase means “to have sex on the floor.”

Similar to “amorous congress,” this euphemism was a gentler term suitable for the upper classes to use, even if they only whispered it.

“Flyers” were shoes, so this phrase describes having sex while still dressed, or “without going to bed.”

Giving a girl a green gown can happen only in the grass.

A woman who sleeps with soldiers coming in at port is said to “make a lobster kettle” of herself.

Those shared by “a fat man and woman in amorous congress.”

A game at pully hawly is a series of affairs.

In the story of St. George and the Dragon, the dragon reared up from a lake to tower over the saint. Playing at St. George or riding St. George casts a woman as the dragon and puts her on top.

Similar to having a brush, making a stitch is having a casual affair.

A tiff could be a minor argument or falling-out. But in the 19th century, it was also a term for eating or drinking between meals—or in this case, a quickie.

A version of this story was published in 2020; it has been updated for 2023.

Are you a logophile? Do you want to learn unusual words and old-timey slang to make conversation more interesting, or discover fascinating tidbits about the origins of everyday phrases? Then get our new book, The Curious Compendium of Wonderful Words: A Miscellany of Obscure Terms, Bizarre Phrases, & Surprising Etymologies, out now! You can pick up your copy on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, or Bookshop.org.

Under J. Edgar Hoover, everybody who was anybody had an FBI file. Here are some interesting things we found while poking around their archives.

Our favorite scientist’s file is over 1800 pages long. Einstein’s German roots always made the Bureau nervous. It didn’t help that he was an outspoken pacifist and socialist (not to mention a harsh critic of Sen. Joseph McCarthy). When Einstein was asked to join the Manhattan project in 1939, the FBI concluded that, “In view of his radical background, this office would not recommend the employment of Dr. Einstein on matters of a secret nature without a very careful investigation, as it seems unlikely that a man of his background could, in such a short time, become a loyal American citizen.”

The FBI suspected that Einstein was a German spy, and it planned to deport him once they found proof: “Notwithstanding his world-wide reputation as a scientist, [Einstein] may properly be investigated for possible revocation of naturalization.” The Bureau came up empty.

Colonel Sanders admired J. Edgar Hoover and occasionally requested favors from him. One time, the Colonel asked Hoover to come to his birthday party, in a letter which now rests in his FBI file:

After searching the Colonel’s criminal record, Hoover gently declined.

In 1957, William Foos began pretending to read through walls. Weeks later, the FBI was at his door asking if his powers were real:

“Should his claims be well-founded, there is no limit to the value which could accrue to the FBI—complete and undetectable access to mail, the diplomatic pouch; visual access to buildings—the possibilities are unlimited insofar as law enforcement and counterintelligence are concerned… It is difficult to see how the bureau can afford to not inquire into this matter more fully. Bureau interest can be completely discreet and controlled and no embarrassment would result.”

Foos went on to perform elaborate card tricks for FBI agents, CIA members, and leading military officers, but the government became suspicious when he refused to divulge his methods. After consulting a slew of psychologists and university studies, the FBI dropped the case, leaving behind this 40-page file on ESP.

Most of the Grateful Dead’s pages are suspiciously blacked out with marker. The file does show, however, how clueless the FBI was about pop music trends. When mentioning the Grateful Dead for the first time, it says, “It would appear this is a rock group of some sort.” The FBI had suspected Jerry Garcia’s group was tied to the criminal drug circle: “LSD originates from San Fransisco, California through a renowned rock group known as Grateful Dead.” Despite its suspicions, the FBI decided not to investigate further.

The FBI holds over 400 pages on Liberace. Most pages focus on a robbery in 1974, when someone stole hundreds of Liberace’s jewels. Other pages look into numerous extortion attempts that attacked Liberace’s sexuality. A meager two pages, however, show that the rhinestone-clad pianist illegally bet on horse races through a bookie in Buffalo, NY. The FBI considered roasting Liberace before a Grand Jury, but later decided against it.

The FBI spent 30 months investigating the song Louie, Louie because the lyrics were thought to be dirty. The song was playing across America, and naughty lyrics would have violated a code that forbade “the distribution of obscene material.” Agents listened to the record at different speeds, interviewed band members, and even researched analyses made by teenagers who claimed to know the song’s “true meaning.” The Bureau eventually gave up because they “were unable to interpret any wording in the record.”

The FBI can’t take a joke. In 1971, the bureau penned a 21-page report after Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In made fun of Hoover and the FBI. In one sketch, a troupe of ditzy cheerleaders wore FBI garb. In another, actors pretended to talk to Hoover through a potted flower, suggesting that the FBI had bugged the plant. It obviously hurt the Bureau’s fragile feelings: “Some of the so-called jokes were not only not humorous but did not make any sense, the sight-gags were ridiculously stupid and the fight song featuring the cheerleaders was to a great extent unintelligible.” According to the file, the most hurtful line was this knock-knock joke, which it called “vicious” and “sick-type”:

“Knock, knock”
“Who’s there?”
“Hoover”
“Hoover who?”
“Hoover heard of a 76-year old policeman?”

In 1941, an FBI agent named Mathew Cvetic joined the Communist Party with the objective of spying on its members. A decade later, Cvetic wrote about his spy adventures. His story appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and was eventually picked up by Warner Brothers, who turned it into an ultra-patriotic (but romanticized) film called, I Was a Communist for the FBI. The film made the Bureau a little nervous. Some parts revealed how the FBI operated; others were just gross misrepresentations. The FBI reported that “Cvetic has no right to presume to speak for the FBI…it might be necessary for us to publicly deny Cvetic’s alleged insinuations.” The FBI later denied that Cvetic had ever been an agent.

You may be surprised to learn that the file that made UFOs (and weather balloons) famous is only one page long:

Text:
“Headquarters eight air force, telephonically advised this office that an object purporting to be a flying disc was recovered near Roswell, New Mexico, this date. The disc is hexagonal in shape and was suspended from a balloon by cable, which balloon was approximately twenty feet in diameter. (censored) further advised that the object found resembles a high altitude weather balloon with a radar reflector, but that telephonic conversation between their office and Wright Field had not borne out of this belief. Disc and balloon being transported to Wright Field by special plane for examination. Information provided this office because of national interest in case. And fact that National Broadcasting Company, Associated Press, and others attempting to break story of location of disc today. (Censored) advised would request Wright Field to advise Cincinnati office results of examination. No further investigation being conducted.”

For nearly two centuries, powdered wigs—called perukes—were all the rage. The chic hairpiece would have never become popular, however, if it hadn’t been for a venereal disease, a pair of self-conscious kings, and poor hair hygiene.

The peruke’s story begins like many others—with syphilis. By 1580, the STD had become the worst epidemic to strike Europe since the Black Death. According to surgeon William Clowes, an “infinite multitude” of syphilis patients clogged London’s hospitals, and more filtered in each day. Without antibiotics, victims faced the full brunt of the disease: open sores, nasty rashes, blindness, dementia, and hair loss. Baldness swept the land.

At the time, hair loss was a one-way ticket to public embarrassment. Long hair was a trendy status symbol, and a bald dome could stain any reputation. When Samuel Pepys’s brother acquired syphilis, the diarist wrote, “If [my brother] lives, he will not be able to show his head—which will be a very great shame to me.” Hair was that big of a deal.

And so, the syphilis outbreak sparked a surge in wigmaking. Victims hid their baldness, as well as the bloody sores that scoured their faces, with wigs made of horse, goat, or human hair. Perukes were also coated with powder—scented with lavender or orange—to hide any funky aromas.

Although common, wigs were not exactly stylish. They were just a shameful necessity. That changed in 1655, when the King of France started losing his hair.

Louis XIV was only 17 when his mop started thinning. Worried that baldness would hurt his reputation, Louis hired 48 wigmakers to save his image. Five years later, the King of England—Louis’s cousin, Charles II—did the same thing when his hair started to gray (both men likely had syphilis). Courtiers and other aristocrats immediately copied the two kings. They sported wigs, and the style trickled down to the upper-middle class. Europe’s newest fad was born.

The cost of wigs increased, and perukes became a scheme for flaunting wealth. An everyday wig cost about 25 shillings—a week’s pay for a common Londoner. The bill for large, elaborate perukes ballooned to as high as 800 shillings. The word bigwig was coined to describe snobs who could afford big, poofy perukes.

When Louis and Charles died, wigs stayed around; perukes remained popular because they were so practical.

At the time, head lice were everywhere, and nitpicking was painful and time-consuming. Wigs, however, curbed the problem. Lice stopped infesting people’s hair—which had to be shaved for the peruke to fit—and camped out on wigs instead. Delousing a wig was much easier than delousing a head of hair: You’d send the dirty headpiece to a wigmaker, who would boil the wig and remove the nits.

But by the late 18th century, the wig trend was dying out. French citizens ousted the peruke during the Revolution, and Brits stopped wearing wigs after William Pitt levied a tax on hair powder in 1795. Short, natural hair became the new craze, and it would stay that way for another two centuries or so.

A version of this story ran in 2012; it has been updated for 2023.

There are countless uninhabited and abandoned islands around the world. Why isn’t anyone living on them? After all, 250 people live on Tristan da Cunha, which is 2430 kilometers from the next inhabited island. Let’s look at a few islands that remain uninhabited for financial, political, environmental, or religious reasons.

Three kilometers off the coast of Japan, Ōkunoshima Island is overrun with rabbits, which are not native to the land. But there are no human residents on Ōkunoshima Island. It was the site of a chemical weapons plant that produced poison gas for the Japanese Imperial Army from 1929 to 1945. In one rabbit origin story, the Allied Occupation Forces dismantled the plant and let laboratory animals go free, and the bunnies quickly populated the island. Another tale suggests that visiting schoolchildren released rabbits on the island in 1971. Ōkunashima was opened to tourism in the 1960s, and since then, viral videos of the furry inhabitants have caused visitor numbers to soar.

In Māori, this group of subantarctic volcanic islets is called Moutere Mahue—“abandoned islands.” The cold climate and harsh winds make the Antipodes too inhospitable for permanent human settlement. Numerous shipwrecked sailors survived on the island before being rescued or dying from the elements. Two people died after being shipwrecked there as recently as 1999.

Jaco Island in East Timor has no permanent inhabitants because local people consider it sacred land. However, that does not mean they won’t accommodate tourists. Day trips as well as camping on the island is allowed. Fishermen double as vendors to the tourists. Since 2007, Jaco Island has been part of Nino Konis Santana National Park.

Clipperton Island is a coral atoll south of Mexico and west of Guatemala in the eastern Pacific. It was claimed first by France, then the U.S., where workers mined it for guano. Mexico took possession in 1897 and allowed a British company to mine guano there. In 1914, the Mexican civil war caused the island’s 100 or so residents to be cut off from transportation and supplies. In 1917, the last surviving islanders, three women, were rescued and evacuated. Ownership reverted to France, which operated a lighthouse on Clipperton Island. It was completely abandoned after World War II.

How can an island in the East River in New York City be forgotten? Because it’s a protected bird sancutary, and therefore off-limits to the public. North Brother Island has quite a history. Riverside Hospital opened a quarantine facility for smallpox patients on the 20-acre island in 1885. The hospital later took in patients with other communicable diseases, such as venereal disease and typhoid. It was here that Typhoid Mary lived for two decades until her death in 1938. The hospital closed in 1942, but the buildings were used for veterans’ housing for a while, then as a rehab center for those with substance abuse disorders, but corruption and civil rights violations forced the facility to close for good in 1963. The buildings still stand in their ruined state, and are said to be haunted by the many who died or suffered there.

Hashima Island in Japan is often referred to as Battleship Island because that’s what it looks like. About 15 kilometers from Nagasaki, the island sat above a profitable coal seam that was mined from 1887 until 1974. Miners and their families lived on the island, which is only around 15 acres in size. At its height, Hashima Island had over 5000 residents, densely packed into large apartment blocks. When the coal business fizzled, those buildings were left empty and derelict. It became dangerous to even set foot on the island, though it was opened to tourism in 2009.

In 1847, the U.S. military built Fort Carroll in the middle of the Patapsco River to protect Baltimore, Maryland. The site was selected because experience showed that a defensive fort built too close to a city created more problems than it solved. The artificial island was built under the supervision of a young Robert E. Lee, who also designed the island’s hexagonal shape. The fort was still incomplete by the time the Civil War began. Construction was halted, and by the time the war was over, the facility’s insufficiency became obvious. The fort was modernized, but not in time to be of much use during the Spanish-American War. By 1921, the army had abandoned Fort Carroll for good. The island was sold to a private developer in 1958, but various plans to use it proved too difficult and expensive to carry out. The fort remains, though it’s slowly crumbling into ruin. 

Lazzaretto Nuovo is an island situated at the entrance of the lagoon that envelops Venice, Italy. It was a monastery in medieval times, then in 1468 was designated as a quarantine area for ships to protect the city from the plague. This continued until the 18th century, when the quarantine facilities were abandoned, and Lazzeretto Nuovo eventually became a military base. The Italian army abandoned the site in 1975, and it suffered years of neglect. Then community efforts turned it into a cultural museum, now supported by the Italian Ministry of Arts and Culture. The island is open for tourism.

Tree Island in the South China Sea is one of the Paracel Islands under disputed ownership. It is administered by China’s Hainan Province, but like the other Paracel Islands, it’s claimed by Vietnam and Taiwan as well. Tourists can visit the island with permission, but the only temporary inhabitants are military troops.

Palmyra Atoll, 1000 miles south of Hawaii, is a territory owned by the United States. However, as isolated as it is, it’s officially uninhabited and unorganized. The U.S. military built an airstrip there during World War II, which has fallen into ruin. The atoll now is administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service with the exception of Cooper Island, which is owned and managed by the Nature Conservancy. Palmyra Atoll was the setting for a double murder in 1974, which became the basis for the novel and then miniseries called And the Sea Will Tell.

A version of this story was published in 2012; it has been updated for 2024.

By the spring of 1862, a year into the American Civil War, Major General Ulysses S. Grant had pushed deep into Confederate territory along the Tennessee River. In early April, he was camped at Pittsburg Landing, near Shiloh, Tennessee, waiting for Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell’s army to meet up with him.

On the morning of April 6, Confederate troops based out of nearby Corinth, Mississippi, launched a surprise offensive against Grant’s troops, hoping to defeat them before the second army arrived. Grant’s men, augmented by the first arrivals from the Ohio, managed to hold some ground, though, and establish a battle line anchored with artillery. Fighting continued until after dark, and by the next morning, the full force of the Ohio had arrived and the Union outnumbered the Confederates by more than 10,000.

The Union troops began forcing the Confederates back, and while a counterattack stopped their advance it did not break their line. Eventually, the Southern commanders realized they could not win and fell back to Corinth until another offensive in August (for a more detailed explanation of the battle, see this animated history).

All told, the fighting at the Battle of Shiloh left more than 16,000 soldiers wounded and more 3,000 dead, and neither federal or Confederate medics were prepared for the carnage.

The bullet and bayonet wounds were bad enough on their own, but soldiers of the era were also prone to infections. Wounds contaminated by shrapnel or dirt became warm, moist refuges for bacteria, which could feast on a buffet of damaged tissue. After months marching and eating field rations on the battlefront, many soldiers’ immune systems were weakened and couldn’t fight off infection on their own. Even the army doctors couldn’t do much; microorganisms weren’t well understood and the germ theory of disease and antibiotics were still a few years away. Many soldiers died from infections that modern medicine would be able to nip in the bud.

Some of the Shiloh soldiers sat in the mud for two rainy days and nights waiting for the medics to get around to them. As dusk fell the first night, some of them noticed something very strange: their wounds were glowing, casting a faint light into the darkness of the battlefield. Even stranger, when the troops were eventually moved to field hospitals, those whose wounds glowed had a better survival rate and had their wounds heal more quickly and cleanly than their unilluminated brothers-in-arms. The seemingly protective effect of the mysterious light earned it the nickname “Angel’s Glow.”

In 2001, almost one hundred and forty years after the battle, seventeen-year-old Bill Martin was visiting the Shiloh battlefield with his family. When he heard about the glowing wounds, he asked his mom – a microbiologist at the USDA Agricultural Research Service who had studied luminescent bacteria that lived in soil – about it.

“So you know, he comes home and, ‘Mom, you’re working with a glowing bacteria. Could that have caused the glowing wounds?’” Martin told Science Netlinks. “And so, being a scientist, of course I said, ‘Well, you can do an experiment to find out.’”

And that’s just what Bill did.

He and his friend, Jon Curtis, did some research on both the bacteria and the conditions during the Battle of Shiloh. They learned that , the bacteria that Bill’s mom studied and the one he thought might have something to do with the glowing wounds, live in the guts of parasitic worms called nematodes, and the two share a strange lifecycle. Nematodes hunt down insect larvae in the soil or on plant surfaces, burrow into their bodies, and take up residence in their blood vessels. There, they puke up the P. luminescens bacteria living inside them. Upon their release, the bacteria, which are bioluminescent and glow a soft blue, begin producing a number of chemicals that kill the insect host and suppress and kill all the other microorganisms already inside it. This leaves P. luminescens and their nematode partner to feed, grow and multiply without interruptions.

As the worms and the bacteria eat and eat and the insect corpse is more or less hollowed out, the nematode eats the bacteria. This isn’t a double cross, but part of the move to greener pastures. The bacteria re-colonize the nematode’s guts so they can hitch a ride as it bursts forth from the corpse in search of a new host.

The next meal shouldn’t be hard to find either, since P. luminescens already sent them an invitation to the party. Just before they got got back in their nematode taxi, P. luminescens were at critical mass in the insect corpse, and scientists think that that many glowing bacteria attract other insects to the body and make the nematode’s transition to a new host much easier.

Looking at historical records of the battle, Bill and Jon figured out that the weather and soil conditions were right for both P. luminescens and their nematode partners. Their lab experiments with the bacteria, however, showed that they couldn’t live at human body temperature, making the soldiers’ wounds an inhospitable environment. Then they realized what some country music fans already knew: Tennessee in the spring is green and cool. Nighttime temperatures in early April would have been low enough for the soldiers who were out there in the rain for two days to get hypothermia, lowering their body temperature and giving P. luminescens a good home.

Based on the evidence for P. luminescens’s presence at Shiloh and the reports of the strange glow, the boys concluded that the bacteria, along with the nematodes, got into the soldiers’ wounds from the soil. This not only turned their wounds into night lights, but may have saved their lives. The chemical cocktail that P. luminescens uses to clear out its competition probably helped kill off other pathogens that might have infected the soldiers’ wounds. Since neither P. luminescens nor its associated nematode species are very infectious to humans, they would have soon been cleaned out by the immune system themselves (which is not to say you should be self-medicating with bacteria; P. luminescens infections can occur, and can result in some nasty ulcers). The soldiers shouldn’t have been thanking the angels so much as the microorganisms.

As for Bill and Jon, their study earned them first place in team competition at the 2001 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.