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The African buffalo looks like a creature that should rule by force. A Cape buffalo bull can weigh up to 900 kilograms and carries a boss, a shield of fused bone across the forehead. Yet the herd is a matriarchy that settles its travel plans by something close to a vote. First described by the Swedish naturalist Anders Sparrman in 1779, Syncerus caffer is the only surviving species of its genus, s...

The hippopotamus of board games and cartoons is chubby, sleepy, and funny. The real animal is a one and a half ton fighter with an evolutionary secret. Its Greek name means river horse, and until 1909 naturalists grouped it with pigs because of its molar teeth. Molecular evidence overturned both ideas: the hippo's closest living relatives are whales, dolphins, and porpoises, with a shared semi-aqu...

The phrase public enemy calls up pinstripe suits, tommy guns, and Al Capone, but it began as a political weapon in ancient Rome. In AD 68 the Senate declared Emperor Nero a hostis publicus, cutting him off from the protection of the law so that anyone could kill him without penalty. The term surfaced again in the United Kingdom around 1642 and turned lethal in the French Revolution, when Maximilie...

Say Machine Gun Kelly and some people see a tattooed musician on a red carpet while others see a Prohibition era gangster with a fedora and a tommy gun. This episode is the biography of a name instead of a person. The original Machine Gun Kelly was an American gangster who lived from 1900 to 1954, and for his whole adult life the name meant real danger and federal manhunts. Then, only four years a...

In 2007 the FBI began flashing fugitives' faces on digital billboards across American cities, yet it did not print color photographs on its paper wanted posters until 2009. That odd timeline opens this history of the wanted poster, an object tied in the imagination to dusty frontier towns but still in use today. At its core the poster has three parts: an image, a description of the alleged crime,...

Hoa Lo means fiery furnace, or simply stove, a name inherited from a Hanoi street where vendors once sold wood and coal stoves. Between 1896 and 1901 the French colonial government built a high security prison there, the Maison Centrale, to hold Vietnamese dissidents. Designed for about 460 inmates, it held more than 1,400 by the 1930s and over 2,000 by 1954. Set in the middle of a crowded city, i...

In a Chinese farming village in 1248, the investigator Song Ci solved a sickle murder without a single interrogation. He had every villager lay a sickle in the sun and waited until flies gathered on the one blade that still carried traces of blood. That scene opens this history of forensic science, the long effort to replace forced confessions and faulty memory with a witness that cannot lie. The...

Flora MacDonald is remembered in statues and song as the romantic Jacobite heroine who saved Bonnie Prince Charlie. The record tells a different story. Born in 1722 on South Uist to a Protestant family of minor gentry, she was raised in a household loyal to the government in London. Her stepfather, Hugh MacDonald, commanded a pro-government militia. When a relative asked her in 1746 to smuggle the...

On an Indo-Pacific beach at low tide, a pitted gray rock near the water's edge can turn out to be a stonefish, the most venomous fish in the world. Members of the genus Synanceia are relatives of scorpionfish and lionfish that have traded flash for invisibility. Their cratered heads and mottled skin copy dead coral, a sticky secretion traps algae and sediment on their bodies, and they can survive...

Thomas Coleman Younger was born in 1844 in Jackson County, Missouri, the seventh of 14 children of a prosperous farmer. His father, Henry, supported the Union and was shot dead anyway by a Union soldier from Kansas. Grief turned Cole toward William Clarke Quantrill's pro-Confederate bushwhackers, and by August 1863 he was riding in the raid on Lawrence, Kansas, where guerrillas burned the town and...

About a mile off Marseille sits a three hectare limestone rock crowned by the Château d'If. King Francis I visited around 1516 and ordered a fortress to shield the port, and between 1524 and 1531 builders raised a square, three story stronghold with three cylindrical towers. It looked fearsome enough that Charles V dropped his plans to attack Marseille, yet it never saw battle. When the military e...

Roughly 50 miles east of Hanksville, in the rough country around the Dirty Devil River in southeastern Utah, a maze of slot canyons gave Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch a hideout that lawmen could not find. This episode treats Robbers Roost as its main character: a natural funnel of sandstone where a posse had to ride single file and one man with a Winchester on the high ground could hold off an...

Bill Tilghman was born in Iowa in 1854 and raised in Kansas territory, where at 17 he took a contract to hunt buffalo for railroad labor camps and claimed more than 3,000 in a single year. That hard schooling carried him to Dodge City, where he opened a saloon called the Crystal Palace and pinned on a deputy badge under Bat Masterson. The line between lawman and outlaw was thin: Masterson himself...

You can use long passwords, multi-factor authentication, and prompt updates and still be exposed to a zero-day: a flaw the software vendor has known about for exactly zero days. This episode separates terms that are often blurred. A vulnerability is the opening, like a bank vault air vent built an inch too wide. An exploit is the specialized tool built to get through it. A 2017 RAND Corporation da...

On January 10th, 1985, Sir Clive Sinclair, the knighted millionaire behind the pocket calculator and the ZX Spectrum, unveiled what he believed was the future of transport at Alexandra Palace in London. It was a three-wheeled, open-air electric vehicle that looked like a plastic bathtub. This episode follows the Sinclair C5 from his long obsession with electric vehicles, through his sale of about...

Starting in November 2008, the Conficker worm, also known as Downadup or Kido, infiltrated somewhere between 9 and 15 million computers. It grounded French military aircraft that could not download flight plans, turned up on Royal Navy warships and submarines, and infected over 800 computers in Sheffield hospitals. Its entry point was a Windows flaw cataloged as MS08-067, which Microsoft had patch...

The blue screen of death was not designed by psychologists to calm anyone down. When Windows NT 3.1 introduced the first true critical error screen in 1993, Microsoft developer John Vert wrote it to match what he already stared at all day: a MIPS workstation and the SlickEdit text editor, which defaulted to white text on a blue background. This episode traces the screen from the garbled text of Wi...

On certain legacy servers, the date is still counted as a day in September 1993. The joke commemorates Eternal September, the moment between late 1993 and early 1994 when the early internet lost its small town feel. This episode reconstructs Usenet before the flood: a network of newsgroups reached mostly through universities and tech companies, passed between machines over phone lines by UUCP, whe...

Most of the looping clips people send today are not GIF files at all. They are silent video files wearing an old disguise. This episode tells the story of the real Graphics Interchange Format, released in June 1987 by a CompuServe team led by Steve Wilhite, when customers paid by the minute and a single color image could take minutes to arrive. The solution was a palette of 256 colors chosen from...

Projectionists running 70 millimeter IMAX prints, some weighing over 600 pounds, control the film platters through software that imitates a handheld device from 1997. This episode explains how that came to be by going back to March 10, 1997, when Palm, then a subsidiary of U.S. Robotics, launched the PalmPilot Personal at $299 and the PalmPilot Professional at $399. Inside was a 16 megahertz Motor...

Google and Facebook spend fortunes on cybersecurity, yet a single Lithuanian fraudster took $100 million from the two of them over two years. He used no exploit at all. He impersonated a hardware supplier both companies worked with, mocked up official letterheads, sent fake invoices, and was paid. This episode treats that case as the entry point to social engineering, the practice of attacking the...

HD DVD reached stores first, cost less to manufacture, had Microsoft behind it, and carried no region codes. It still ended with Toshiba abandoning the format and absorbing a loss of $986 million. This episode goes back to the problem both camps were trying to solve: high-definition televisions fed by 480p DVDs that topped out around eight and a half gigabytes. Shuji Nakamura's practical blue lase...

The floppy disk was declared obsolete well over a decade ago, yet it coordinated functions of the United States nuclear forces until 2019 and loaded flight software onto British Airways Boeing 747s until that fleet retired in 2020. This episode starts in 1971, when IBM introduced an eight-inch, read-only disk for loading microcode into mainframes, and follows the format as it shrank to the 5.25-in...

The fax machine is older than the telephone. Scottish inventor Alexander Bain received a British patent in 1843 for his electric printing telegraph, and by 1865 Giovanni Caselli's pantelegraph was running a commercial service between Paris and Lyon, 11 years before Alexander Graham Bell's invention. This episode traces how synchronized pendulums, copper plates, and insulating ink turned images int...

In 1964 you could step into a booth in New York's Grand Central Terminal and see a live video feed of a friend in Chicago. You also had to reserve the slot in advance, make sure the other person travelled to a matching booth, and pay $27 for three minutes. This episode follows the AT&T Picturephone from a Bell Labs experiment in the 1930s, where Dr. Herbert Ives led more than 200 scientists, e...