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After researchers at the University of Washington trapped crows while wearing a caveman mask, crows kept mobbing anyone wearing it for over five years. Most of the scolding birds had never been captured and apparently learned the danger from parents and flockmates.

In 1998, a Pixar employee accidentally ran a delete command that wiped about 90% of Toy Story 2's files, and the backups had been failing for a month. The film was saved by the home computer of supervising technical director Galyn Susman, who was working from home on maternity leave.

Street Fighter II combos were not a designed feature. They came from an unintended bug that let one attack cancel into the next. The developers left it in rather than fix it, and it became a core system of the Fighting game genre.

The North American wood frog freezes in winter, with its heart and breathing stopped, and revives when it thaws. Alaskan wood frogs stayed frozen for about 193 days in a study, and all of them survived.

Many languages name the @ sign after an animal or a food. Korean calls it a sea snail ("golbaengi"), Dutch a little monkey's tail ("apestaartje"), and Hebrew a strudel ("shtrudl").

In Major League Baseball, new baseballs are rubbed with a special river mud to remove their slick shine. Coach Lena Blackburne found it in a Delaware River tributary in the 1930s, and his company still harvests and sells it.

In Space Invaders, the aliens speed up as you shoot them because of a hardware limit: with fewer sprites to redraw, the processor finished each frame faster. Designer Tomohiro Nishikado chose to keep the effect as a gameplay feature.

A level in Crash Bandicoot ran tens of megabytes, but the PlayStation had only 2MB of RAM. Naughty Dog solved this by loading just the needed chunks from the CD and constantly swapping them in and out of memory.

Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, won gold in literature at the 1912 Stockholm art competition. He entered his poem "Ode to Sport" under pseudonyms.

Cup Noodles hang in mid-cup because the noodle block is wider than the cup's base. Dropped in, the blocks kept tipping over. Momofuku Ando's fix: set the block upside down, lower the cup over it, then flip both upright.

Michael Jackson held a US Patent (5,255,452) for a shoe that let him recreate the gravity-defying lean from Smooth Criminal on stage. A heel slot hooks onto a peg rising through the floor.

The Windows 95 startup sound was composed on a Macintosh, not a PC. Brian Eno later said he had never used a PC in his life.

In Super Mario Bros., the clouds and bushes are the same graphic painted in different colors. The Famicom had little memory and a tight color limit, so the developers reused the same parts.

Comic Sans was created after a designer saw a cartoon dog in Microsoft Bob speaking in Times New Roman. But the new font ran larger than the speech bubbles allowed, so it never made it into Bob itself.

Chupa Chups' logo was designed by Salvador Dalí in 1969. He had it placed on top of the wrapper, not the side. A side logo gets torn off when you unwrap the lollipop, but the top one stays readable.

In E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the candy that lures the alien was meant to be M&M's, but maker Mars turned the offer down. The film used Reese's Pieces instead, and its sales jumped 65% within a month of release.

In the Pokémon Trading Card Game, Kadabra got no new cards for about 20 years after 2003. Uri Geller had sued, claiming the spoon-wielding Pokémon was based on him. In 2020 he dropped the case and apologized.

Volvo invented the modern three-point seatbelt in 1959, then released the patent for free so every automaker could use it. The founders gave up a fortune in exclusive profit, reasoning that safety should never be a competitive advantage.

A 2011 University of Northampton study found that cows form 'best friend' pairs. Heifers kept their heart rate low when paired with a familiar partner they usually grazed or rested with, but it spiked with stress when paired with an unfamiliar cow instead.

In 1996, residents of the English town Scunthorpe couldn't sign up for AOL because its automated filter flagged a substring in the name as profanity. The glitch became known as the 'Scunthorpe problem,' and several other place names hit the same snag.