Mental Floss

TECH

iStock/Callipso

From your car, to your lawn mower, to your snow blower, to your chainsaw—the power of almost every engine you deal with is measured in terms of horsepower. None of these things seemingly have anything to do with horses, so where did that measurement come

Matt Soniak

The Game Genie was the technological holy grail of my Nintendo-playing childhood. Here was a device that would let me play Super Mario Bros. with infinite lives, or get infinite rockets in Metroid. Here's exactly how it worked, and how people are still us

Chris Higgins


Finally, an answer!

When I was a kid with a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), sometimes my games wouldn't load. But I, like all kids, knew the secret: take out the game cartridge, blow on the contacts, and put it back in. And it seemed to work. (When it failed, I'd ju

Chris Higgins




iStock

Just recently we were reminded how delicate our online ecosystem really is when the mysterious group Anonymous took down big websites like Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal because they refused to support WikiLeaks. Anonymous is the latest in the fascinating h

Rob Lammle


0meer/iStock via Getty Images

Soap operas, "soaps" or "my stories," as many a <em>grandmother</em> has called them, are dramas presented in a serial format on daytime television or radio. Their name comes from a time when old serial dramas broadcast on radio had soap manufacturers (Pr

Matt Soniak