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A hiker in southern Brazil leans a hand against a tree trunk and feels a sharp burn. No snake, no spider. The hand has landed on a cluster of Lonomia caterpillars, the larvae of a giant silkworm moth whose adults are harmless and often have no working mouthparts. The caterpillars look like lichen or a knot in the bark, and they rest together in dense groups low on the trunk. Their hollow, branchin...

The name Casanova now means a promiscuous lover, but Giacomo Girolamo Casanova was also a law graduate at 17, a cleric, a violinist, a spy, and a founder of the French state lottery. Born in Venice in 1725, he learned early that people want to believe in secret knowledge. When a senator named Bragadin suffered a stroke in a gondola, Casanova overruled the doctor, had a mercury ointment washed off,...

Carlos Henrique Raposo, known as Carlos Kaiser, spent 14 years as a professional footballer while avoiding almost any actual football. Born in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1963, he had real youth spells at Botafogo and Flamengo and signed with the Mexican club Puebla in 1979, only to be released months later without a match. He loved the status and hated the work, so he turned the job into networking,...

Type the word Candiru into Wikipedia and you get no answer, only a question about which Candiru you meant. This episode takes that short disambiguation page as its entire source and treats it as a study in how databases cope with human language. The page lists three things under the same seven letters: a number of fish species known by a common name, the Candiru phlebovirus, and an Israeli spyware...

A juror once complained to a judge that police had failed to dust the lawn for fingerprints. That story opens this episode on the CSI effect, the claim that the show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which premiered in 2000, rewired what the public expects from forensic science. On screen, lab technicians raid houses and interrogate suspects, plaster poured into a stab wound reveals the exact knife,...

Gulag was never a Russian word for prison. It was an acronym for a government office, the main directorate of correctional labor camps, run by the secret police from the 1930s. This episode examines the machinery behind the name: the tsarist exile system that once held Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, the early Bolshevik camps built to quarantine political enemies, and the monastery island of Solovki,...

From 1996 to 2013, a lake on a golf course in Queensland, Australia held a thriving population of bull sharks. This episode explains how a marine predator ends up there. The bull shark is stocky and built for shallow, murky water, with females reaching 13 feet and over 1,300 pounds when pregnant. Its bite, measured at up to 1,330 pounds of force, is the strongest for its weight of any cartilaginou...

Between 1784 and 1868, Britain shipped roughly 160,000 men, women, and children to penal colonies in Australia, and about four million Australians now trace their ancestry to them. This episode begins in the crowded, gin-soaked cities of 18th century England, where the Bloody Code made 222 crimes punishable by death, including stealing a rabbit. Juries refused to convict, jails overflowed into rot...

Someone in a bullet-resistant vest kicks in a front door at night to seize a fugitive, with no police badge and no search warrant. That is bounty hunting, a real profession practiced almost exclusively in the United States. This episode explains the civil contract behind it: a defendant pays a bail bondsman a fee of about 10 percent, the bondsman guarantees the full bail to the court, and if the d...

In 1876, Spanish officials arrested a common seaman stepping off a ship because they knew his face from a political cartoon. He was William Tweed, Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall, once the third largest landowner in New York City and the man accused of taking between 25 million and 200 million dollars from its taxpayers. This episode follows the chair maker's son, born on the Lower East Side in 1823, f...

A bloodhound named Nick Carter followed a trail that was 300 hours old in 1900, and in Oregon in 1954 another hound worked a 330-hour-old trail to find a missing family. This episode explains how a dog that looks like a sleepy cartoon outperforms any sensor. Nearly 300 million scent receptors do the processing, long ears sweep shed skin cells up from the ground, and the loose wrinkled skin known a...

The black mamba is olive, khaki, or gunmetal, never black. Its name comes from the inky interior of its mouth, which it shows only as a last warning. This episode separates the legend from the biology of Africa's longest venomous snake, an animal that averages two to three meters, weighs only a few pounds, tops out near 16 kilometers per hour, and returns to the same termite mound or rock crevice...

In late October 1921, a 67-year-old sports columnist finished a piece on boxing at the New York Morning Telegraph and died of a heart attack at his typewriter. He was Bat Masterson, born in Quebec in 1853, a former buffalo hunter who survived the five-day siege of Adobe Walls in 1874, took a bullet to the pelvis in Sweetwater, Texas, and walked with a cane for the rest of his life. This episode fo...

In November 1934, a woman named Helen left her husband's bullet-riddled body beside an Illinois cemetery, wrapped in a blanket because he always hated being cold. The dead man was Lester Joseph Gillis, known to the press as Baby Face Nelson and to his friends simply as Jimmy. This episode traces his path from a Chicago boy who shot a playmate in the jaw at age 12, through a gas station that fronte...

Arsenic, element 33, has been an assassin's tool, a cosmetic, and a medicine, sometimes in the same era. The explanation starts on the periodic table, where it sits directly below phosphorus. The two elements bond in nearly identical ways, so cells that depend on phosphorus for DNA and energy let arsenic in by mistake. Once inside it cannot do the job, energy molecules fall apart, and the cell die...

Arnold Rothstein, known as the Brain, built a criminal empire with arithmetic instead of muscle. Born in New York City in 1882 to an affluent family, he was the son of Abraham Rothstein, a businessman so upright he was called Abe the Just, and the brother of a future rabbi. Arnold hated school, loved numbers, and gambled from childhood despite his father's orders. By 1910, at 28, he ran his own ca...

Apollo Robbins once walked into the protective bubble around former President Jimmy Carter, chatted with the Secret Service agents on the detail, and came away with Carter's itinerary and the keys to the motorcade. He used no weapon and no gadget, only an understanding of how attention works. Born in 1974 in Plainview, Texas, Robbins was a soft-spoken child who wore leg braces and grew up with a f...

Alvin Karpis did not die young in a hail of bullets like most Depression era outlaws. Born in Montreal in 1907 to Lithuanian immigrant parents and raised in Topeka, Kansas, he was running with gamblers and bootleggers by about age 10. Prison introduced him to Fred Barker, and after his release in 1931 the two formed the Barker-Karpis gang. Nicknamed Creepy for his smile, Karpis was the planner wit...

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...