Modern medicine can do some pretty miraculous stuff. Yet many dangers that kill people every year don’t need sci-fi technology to solve the problem. Often, humans are just careless, lazy, or shortsighted. Changing our habits prevents millions of deaths, and the solutions are sometimes shockingly simple.

10A Box Of Clothes Vastly Improved Finland’s Infant Mortality Rate

During the early 1940s, Finland had a big problem with infant mortality. At one stage, 9 percent of all babies died early in life. To tackle the problem, the government started giving all expectant mothers a box containing a selection of useful items. These included clothes, bedding, grooming products, and other newborn essentials. Today, parents even get condoms. Bottles and disposable diapers were in for a while but were removed in 2006 to encourage breast feeding and protect the environment. Reusable cloth diapers are included instead.

One of the box’s most unusual features is that it comes with a mattress,. For many Finnish babies, the cardboard box itself is their first bed. This has broken the habit of babies sleeping in the parents’ bed, which is a known factor in Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. As a result, Finland’s infant mortality rate has dropped significantly since the box was introduced.

The box has become a staple of parenthood in Finland, and it’s popular among people of all incomes. People can instead opt for €140, but only 5 percent of parents take the cash. Many who do are on their second child and simply reuse the box they got for their firstborn. It’s so important to the Finns that some expats, who aren’t eligible to get it for free, actually pay for one and have relatives send it by post.

9Smaller Packets Prevent Overdoses

Buying headache pills in the UK is very different from doing so in the US. Americans can pick up a 500-pill bottle of acetaminophen, the main ingredient in Tylenol, quite easily. In the UK, it’s known as paracetamol, and the largest packet you’ll find in a supermarket holds 16 pills. On top of that, it always comes in blister packs, with each pill stored separately.

The difference is due to a law passed in the UK in September 1998. Restricting pills prevents overdoses. It’s still very possible to acquire 500 pills. Many stores stock them cheaply, and you can buy more than 100 at once without a prescription. It’s just inconvenient, but that’s enough to keep many people from abusing them.

In the first year after the law came into effect, one hospital in Newcastle saw average overdose referrals drop from 2.5 per month to 1. At London’s Royal Free Hospital, paracetamol overdoses dropped by 21 percent in the same period. A more recent study found that in the first 11 years after the change, an estimated 765 lives were saved. In addition, the number of registrations for liver transplants for people affected by paracetamol toxicity was reduced by 61 percent.

8Longer Colonoscopies Encourage Repeat Visits

When cancer deaths dropped in the US between 2006 and 2007, 65 percent of the lives saved across all cancers was due to improved colorectal screening. Yet it could be better—only half of eligible adults were getting the routine procedure. A lot of people got their first one but didn’t return for a second because they found it unpleasant.

Researchers thought that they could improve repeat screening rates by influencing how people remember the procedure. The method they came up with seems ludicrous: They left the camera inserted for a few minutes longer right at the end. The camera resting in the bowel once the screening ends is a much less uncomfortable experience than what comes before, when it moves around inside.

Patients reported the screening as less painful overall with the camera in for longer. The result was an increase in people returning for a follow-up colonoscopy, raising the chance of detecting cancer while it can still be treated.

7Nils Bohlin’s Seat Belt

The seat belt is one of the most well-known life saving devices in the world. Yet a belt only helps if people wear it. Every year in the US, around 5,000 people still die in accidents they’d have survived had they worn their belt.

That number would be higher but for Nils Bohlin. The aircraft designer worked for Volvo in the 1950s and realized human nature was the problem. He said, “The pilots I worked with were willing to put on almost anything to keep them safe in case of a crash, but regular people in cars don’t want to be uncomfortable even for a minute. ”

People skipped belting up because it took too long. His solution was the famous three-point belt with a simple clip, which can be put on in seconds with a single hand.

6Text Messages Save Diabetics

The human memory can be pretty awful. We’re easily distracted. That’s bad news for diabetes patients, who need to regularly check their blood glucose levels and take medication. Modern technology offers an interesting solution: Send people frequent reminders by text.

Teenagers get distracted a lot and also check texts a lot. A pilot study in Ohio found that text reminders increased treatment adherence among adolescents. In fact, after three months, patients who received frequent texts were three times less likely to forget to take their medication.

Another University of Chicago study on 74 staff members found similar results. Those with the worst blood sugar before the trial showed the biggest overall improvement. Total cost of care, including complications, dropped 8.8 percent.

People who aren’t diabetics get medical benefits from texts, too. Improper contraceptive use results in one million unintended pregnancies every year in the US. When researchers sent text reminders to women, the fraction taking oral contraceptives rose from 54 to 64 percent. Half even asked to continue receiving the messages once the study was over.

5Typed Prescriptions Reduce Errors

Among doctors’ many fine qualities, handwriting doesn’t rank very highly. That’s a big problem because handwritten prescriptions dominate in US healthcare, and one study found that 37 percent of these handwritten prescriptions result in an error. That doesn’t even count totally unreadable prescriptions, where pharmacists have to call the prescriber.

Every year, 7,000 die due to hospital medication errors. One study found that 61 percent of medication errors result from poor handwriting.

The solution is simple: Type prescriptions out on a computer. The 37-percent error rate for handwritten prescriptions drops to 7 percent with a computerized system. But there are two barriers to change. First, physicians are often set in their ways. Second, a suitable system costs money. While error reductions could save money in the long term, hospitals are reluctant to invest the upfront fees.

Australia addressed the problem in the 1990s with incentives, and now 90 percent of their prescriptions are issued electronically.

4K1 Syringe

Every year, dirty syringes kill 1.3 million people. While some victims use illicit drugs, most simply receive injections from clinics with limited funds. Using every syringe twice halves the number a facility needs to buy, adding up to significant savings. Yet given that diseases from reused syringes cost $100 billion annually, it’ll be much better for everyone if reuse just stopped.

Inventor Mark Koska’s solution was the K1 Auto Disable Syringe. It can be used only once—once the plunger goes down, it locks and can’t be drawn back. And it costs the same to manufacture as a standard syringe.

Koska received an anonymous video from Tanzania of a needle being used on four-year-old, then an adult HIV patient, and then a one-year-old baby. When he showed the video to a Tanzanian minister, the government agreed to use his syringes exclusively. The program costs an extra $7 million but will save $70 million each year.

3Tetris Reduces Trauma

After playing the game Tetris for an extended length of time, you start seeing blocks everywhere. There are blocks when you dream, blocks when you close your eyes . . . everything in your world becomes blocks. The same thing can happen with any repetitive pattern game—people may be more familiar with it from games like Candy Crush nowadays.

The widely experienced phenomenon speaks to the unusual way games like Tetris play with our brains. This convinced researchers to look into how it affects those with mental health problems, and they’ve found something curious. Tetris seems to protect against PTSD and flashbacks.

Researchers showed experiment participants a disturbing film. During the next six hours, some answered trivia, some played Tetris, and others did nothing much at all. Over the following week, people who’d played the 1980s classic had far fewer flashbacks.

The psychologist behind the study believes the spatial concentration required to play may interfere with how the brain consolidates traumatic memories.

2Lucky Iron Fish

Iron deficiency is the most widespread health problem worldwide. In developing countries, it affects half of all pregnant women and 40 percent of young children. Anemia contributes to 20 percent of maternal deaths. It impairs physical and cognitive development and reduces adult productivity. It’s the only nutrient deficiency that significantly affects industrialized nations. In total, it hurts around two billion people.

Cambodia is one of the countries most affected. Much of the population survives on less than a dollar per day and can’t afford red meat or other foods high in iron. Cooking food in an iron pot can leach iron safely into a meal, but iron cooking pots are expensive, and most of Cambodia’s population cook in aluminum.

In 2008, Canadian epidemiologist Christopher Charles had the idea to give locals a lump of iron to put in their cooking pots. Local women didn’t like the idea and used the lumps as doorstops instead. He tried an iron piece in the shape of a lotus leaf, but that proved just as unpopular. Then he hit a breakthrough.

Local elders told Charles about the kantrop, a popular fish considered good luck. Charles gave an iron fish charm to every household in a rural village. The local women happily put the symbol of luck into their cooking pots, and within a year, almost all cases of anemia in the village had disappeared.

The fish provides 75 percent of the daily requirement of iron, and lasts for up to five years. The work of distributing the fish is ongoing, and people can donate to the project online.

1The Sign That Stops Suicides

Japan’s most infamous suicide spot is Aokigahara, a forest on the northwestern base of Mount Fuji. Hundreds of people attempt suicide there every year. Many suffer from debt. For example, police found one 44-year-old man after two weeks in the forest, weak but alive. He owed 1.5 million Yen ($15,000) to a consumer loan company.

So in 2007, a loan shark victims’ association put up a sign in the forest. The sign includes the phone number of a hotline to talk about financial woes, along with the following simple message: “Your loan problem can definitely be solved.”

Within a year, 29 people called the helpline from within the forest itself. All had planned to kill themselves, and all decided not to.

+Lists Save Lives

Modern medical care can go spectacularly wrong, often due to doctors’ carelessness and forgetfulness. One effective way to overcome human error is to use simple lists.

For example, half of intensive-care patients in the US receive a catheter as part of their treatment. Around 80,000 of them end up with an infection as a result, and 28,000 die from their infections. A trial at nine hospitals in the US introduced a five-point checklist for people receiving catheters. The list was simple: Wash hands with soap, clean the patient’s skin, apply sterile drapes, wear sterile clothes, and then dress the catheter site. When the checklist was implemented, the hospitals eliminated all infections, saving 1,500 lives.

In industrialized countries, a quarter of inpatient surgeries result in complications, comprising half of all adverse events in hospitals. Half of those are preventable. To reduce those numbers, the WHO created a 19-point checklist for use in all surgeries. Some of the steps are surprisingly simple, including every team member introducing themselves at the start of a surgery. Yet it’s been tried in dozens of countries, and it reduced complications by one-third. In one analysis, deaths due to surgical mistakes were halved by having a checklist in place.

The mind can stumble over simple things. At times, a biological glitch is responsible. Then we see the wrong colors, cannot stop eating, or struggle to look honest during a conversation.

Other triggers have no explanation for why they mess with the mind—like being offered a hat or a cookie. Then people float out of chairs and give away dangerous information. Indeed, the hiccups of the brain remain a fascinating world.

10 Bizarre Ways Your Sense Of Touch Changes How You Think

10 The Food Variety Effect

Christmas is full of cheer, tinsel, and weight gain. The festive season is notorious for leaving extra padding. Even though people eat more during this time, they are often surprised by the amount of weight that greets them in January. This is largely due to a phenomenon known as the “variety effect.” The more food is on offer, the more people eat without realizing it.

Nature has a way of curbing the appetite. The longer the tongue deals with the same texture or flavor, the more one’s appetite diminishes. Presto, the meal ends without gorging oneself.

However, this mechanism fails when people graze at buffets, Thanksgiving dinners, or Christmas lunches. Switching between different foods delays the desire to stop eating because the flavors and textures keep changing. This is why something as simple as a meal with several courses can fool guests about how much they consume in one sitting.^[1]

9 Eye Contact Freaks Out The Brain

According to body language books, people who don’t maintain eye contact might just be untrustworthy characters. However, there is now evidence that the weasel factor is not the entire story.

Those who cannot stare at another person while holding a sparkling conversation are experiencing an unusual effect. Our brains use the same regions for talking, thinking, and keeping eye contact. Sometimes, this causes a mental traffic jam.

This conclusion came from a small Japanese study. But the outcome suggested that the brain struggles with the combination of focusing on a face and thinking of words to say. The effect worsens when the conversation uses new or difficult phrases.

To cope, the befuddled brain tries to single-task by making the person feel that he has to avert his eyes.^[2]

8 Crossed Arms Can Bring Pain Relief

There are plenty of ways to stop the pain. But pills and potions aside, the future of pain relief could include physiotherapists demonstrating poses to confuse the brain.

A small study in 2011 showed that the idea might not be as ludicrous as it sounds. Twenty people agreed to be zapped by a laser. After being burned on their hands, they crossed their arms to see if this simple act could reduce the pain.

The participants reported that their hands felt better and their EEG caps, which measured the brain’s electrical mood, said the same thing. Apparently, the noggin is used to the left hand touching the left side of the world. The same with the right hand and side.

Crossing the arms places the injured hand on the wrong side and tricks the brain into a weaker pain awareness. That is the theory anyway. But for a new pain therapy still in its infancy, the scientific evidence is looking good.^[3]

7 Left And Right

Turn left? Go right? Left-right confusion is surprisingly common. Sometimes, it leads to terrifying mistakes—like the pair of surgeons who once removed the wrong kidney and the patient died. Even more disturbing, when more medical professionals were tested, too many identified the incorrect eye booked for surgery.

The problem grows when there is pressure to pick a side. A passenger giving directions to a speeding driver is also more likely to say “turn that way” and end up in the wrong place.^[4]

Two directions. A simple confusion. Yet despite countless attempts, scientists still do not know why this happens. They have a suspicion, though, that the brain’s way of processing the different sides is more complicated than just looking one way or the other.

Telling somebody else to go a certain way or trying to see their left or right when it’s the opposite of our own can mess with the mind. Especially when there is no time to consider things at a slower pace.

6 The Good Looks Bias

Nobody likes to think that something as superficial as looks can sway their opinion. But the statistics are there. Attractive people get more votes and shorter criminal sentences. They are also viewed as more honest, trustworthy, kind, and intelligent.

This does not mean that everybody is a shallow idiot. Once again, science suggests that the brain is making a multitasking blooper.

The same brain region rates beautiful faces and good behavior in others. So, when the brain thinks about hot eyebrows, it also assumes things about the person’s character that might not be so positive in reality.

The same channel also works in reverse. When that happens, people who are not conventionally attractive are seen as beautiful because they have gracious personalities.^[5]

10 Fascinating Ways Our Brains Can Be Manipulated

5 Kids Think Birthday Parties Cause Aging

They know that it’s time for presents and cake and that today is all about them. That is not the confusing part. In a cute way, some children believe that the birthday party itself makes them older.

After researchers spoke to children aged four to nine years old, some kids said that they would never grow older without a birthday party. When asked if the elderly could regain their youth by celebrating their birthdays in reverse (an 80-year-old celebrating his 79th birthday, for example), a couple of kids believed that this was possible.^[6]

Like adults, children look for meaning in personal events. Turning older is a big deal, but the only obvious thing happening is the party. Therefore, the younger the child, the likelier they are to mistake the celebration as the reason they just aged.

4 Motion Sickness Is Mistaken For Poison

Scientists believe that the brain has a fear of being poisoned. When signals do not add up, the brain uses an old faithful to rid the body of toxins—the barf. Unfortunately, the brain sometimes imagines things. Motion sickness is a classic example.

Evolution cannot keep up with technology. In this case, the human body never adapted to moving transport. The main problem is that vehicles make it hard for the brain to decide whether the body is on the move or is stationary.

There is little muscle action, so the brain knows that the person is sitting still. However, the ears carry a special fluid capable of sensing movements. During a drive, the sloshing sends a clear message. This body is hurtling forward.^[7]

The mixed signals wreak havoc with the brain’s hypochondria. Convinced that the body ingested something bad, the brain triggers nausea. Some people get it so bad that they are forced to pull over to throw up. Interestingly, it remains a mystery as to why motion sickness only affects certain individuals and not others.

3 Color Changes When The Brain Bumbles Light

When that happens, things can get nasty online. Take a Tumblr post in 2015, for example. It showed a dress, which was simple enough. But two factions were soon at each other’s throats. The one side insisted that the garment was blue and black. The rest called them idiots because the dress was clearly white and gold.

Nobody lied. Things just went a bit haywire in the brain department.^[8]

When we look at something, wavelengths of light hit the retina and stimulate the brain’s visual areas. This makes us see an image. Normally, the brain filters out the source of light and tries to extract more light frequencies from the object itself.

In this case, when the brain succeeded in sponging the object’s light, people saw the real dress—the one that was blue and black. But the white-and-gold crowd fell foul to a simple switch. Instead of focusing on the material’s wavelengths, their brains gave more love to the source of light around it (probably the daylight).

2 Trading Personal Information For A Cookie

Most people want their private information to stay private. They go to great lengths to keep the details away from the devils out there. But something odd happened in 2014. A stranger offered cookies, and people gladly handed over their sensitive information.

Parents warn their kids against sweetie people like this. But apparently, the adults themselves cannot resist the right lure. Visitors to an arts festival in Brooklyn found this out the hard way. Luckily for them, it was an experiment and not an identity racket.

Artist Risa Puno offered cookies decorated with the Instagram logo. The trendy treats were a hit. They could be “bought” with personal details. To get a cookie, people had to give Puno their phone numbers, driver’s license details, maiden names, fingerprints, or the last few digits of their social security numbers.

Even though these nuggets are gold to criminals, the cookies sweetened 380 people into parting with their personal details.^[9]

Maybe it was the cookie’s innocence. Maybe it was the smile of an artist standing at an official-looking space at an art festival. Whatever witchcraft was responsible even made people ignore a notice saying that Puno could share their details with third parties.

In the end, the experiment was done to test a theory. The latter suggested that people want their information to stay safe but do not grasp the dangers of trading tidbits about their privacy. This makes it easy to sway them with something as simple as a frosted cookie.

1 The God Helmet

In 2018, researchers played with people’s heads. More specifically, they made people wear skateboarding helmets and told these individuals that the wires hanging from the headgear were going to influence their brains.

The researchers also said that each helmet’s electrical current could give the participants a spiritual experience. Even the hat’s name was enough to invoke awe in the more religious-minded. It was called the “God Helmet.”

The helmet was just a helmet. The wires were connected to a device with lights, but that was just for show. There was no electrical current. The scientists aimed to see if alcohol could make people believe that they were having a spiritual encounter. For this reason, the team reaped 193 participants from a music festival in the Netherlands where tipsy and drugged volunteers were guaranteed.^[10]

Each person wore the helmet for 15 minutes. During that time, their hearing and sight were blocked with white noise and a blindfold, respectively. In the end, drugs and alcohol did not give anyone an edge.

Both sober and sozzled festivalgoers experienced bizarre things. Most felt some kind of space or time distortion, hallucinations, or unusual physical sensations. Some heard voices or floated out of their chairs.

Interestingly, those who reacted the strongest to the placebo hat were the self-reported believers in spirituality—but not necessarily God. If anything, their faith could have made them more susceptible to suggestion than the rest.

10 Mysterious Soundscapes That Rocked The Ancient World

A lot of students hate math, even though the world runs on mathematics. Huge sums of money and equipment worth millions of dollars have been lost simply because someone made some tiny math mistake. Computers also have made errors like this, too, but that can still be blamed on humans since we did the programming.

To be clear, some calamities were caused by errors involving complex math, which is arguably more forgivable. However, the ones we have here are mostly ridiculously simple mistakes that even an elementary school student might not have made.

10 Gulf War Scud Missile Attack

On February 25, 1991, an Iraqi “Scud” missile struck a US Army base in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, killing 28 soldiers and injuring 100 others. The disaster was surprising, considering that the base was protected by a Patriot missile air defense system. Investigations revealed that the system did not attempt to intercept the Scud.

The error was traced to the software powering the clock of the system. The clock recorded time in deciseconds (one tenth of a second) but stored that data as an integer. It converted the time into a 24-bit floating point number to do this. However, rounding the times in order to convert them led to gradually increasing inaccuracy as the system operated. As a result, the system was not able to intercept missiles after 20 hours of continuous use.

At the time of the attack, the Patriot missile battery in question had been operating for 100 hours. The time disparity was such that it looked in the wrong part of the sky for the incoming missile and therefore found no target. The US Army had been made aware of this software issue and had released an update on February 16. The update only reached the Dharan base on February 26, a day after the attack.^[1]

9 Spain’s S-80 Submarine Program

In 2003, Spain launched the $2.7 billion S-80 submarine program to build four diesel-electric submarines for the Spanish navy. Spain had almost completed one of the submarines in 2013, when it discovered that the sub was 70 tons heavier than it should have been. The Spanish navy feared the submarine would never surface if it went underwater.

The submarine ended up heavy after someone put a decimal point in the wrong spot during calculations. No one discovered the error until the first submarine was completed, and the other three were already under construction. Spain later signed a $14 million deal with Electric Boat of Groton, Connecticut, to help them reduce the weight of the 2,200-ton submarine.^[2]

8 Air Canada Flight 143

In July 1983, an Air Canada Boeing 767 flying from Ottawa to Edmonton with 69 passengers and crew had to crash-land after running out of fuel at 12,500 meters (41,000 ft). The engines suddenly lost power, and the airplane started gliding to the ground. It glided for 100 kilometers (60 mi) before landing in Gimli, Manitoba.

It came down on a racetrack that had originally been a runway. Luckily, there were no deaths. However, two people had minor injuries, and the nose gear was destroyed. This landing earned Flight 143 the nickname of “Gimli Glider.”

The accident was traced to a conversion error. Air Canada used the imperial system of measurement but was converting to the metric system, which this Boeing 767 already used. Air Canada ground crews had used the imperial system when they refueled the airplane. They measured the fuel in pounds instead of kilograms.

One kilogram equals 2.2 pounds. This meant the airplane had only around half the amount of fuel it required to complete the flight. The pilots did not notice the discrepancy because the fuel gauge was not working. Ground crews used drip sticks to measure the fuel at the time they filled the tanks.

Interestingly, the ground crews made the mistake twice. The first was in Montreal, and the second was in Ottawa. The airplane made the Montreal-to-Ottawa flight without incident but literally flew into problems when it was flying from Ottawa to Edmonton.^[3]

7 Sinking Of The Vasa

On August 10, 1628, Sweden launched a new, heavily armed, and large warship: the Vasa. The vessel had barely sailed for 20 minutes when it sank less than a mile from shore. Thirty people died in the sinking. The ship was later retrieved in the 20th century and is now held at the Vasa Museum.

Historians measured the entire ship and discovered that its builders used two different units of measurement. One was the Swedish foot, and the other was the Amsterdam foot. A Swedish foot is 12 inches, while an Amsterdam foot is 11 inches.

The difference between both units of measurements caused one side to end up heavier than the other. This was why the ship leaned to one side and promptly sank after it was hit by two gusts of wind. Historians add that the effect of the wind was worsened by the fact that the top of the ship was heavier than its bottom.^[4]

6 Mars Climate Orbiter Crash

The Mars Climate Orbiter was a $125-million joint project between Lockheed Martin and NASA/JPL. The project suffered an embarrassing end when the orbiter most likely crashed into Mars due to a simple conversion error in 1999. Lockheed Martin used the imperial system of measurement while programming software, but NASA used the metric system.

Engineers at NASA would have detected the error if they’d been paying attention. However, they did not. No one realized something was amiss throughout the Mars Climate Orbiter‘s nine-month journey to Mars, either. The mistake only became obvious when NASA lost contact with the orbiter.

In response to the incident, John Logsdon of George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute said the whole thing was “dumb.” John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists added, “It was embarrassing to lose a spacecraft to such a simple math error.”^[5]

5 Ariane 5 Rocket Explosion

On June 4, 1996, the European Space Agency’s Ariane 5 rocket exploded 37 seconds after takeoff. Onboard the spacecraft were four satellites. The rocket and satellites cost $370 million. The accident was traced to an integer overflow error in the software used for launching the rocket.

An integer overflow is a mathematical error that occurs when the figures generated by a system exceeds the memory of that system. The Ariane 5 operated on 16-bit software capable of storing figures up to 32,767. The rocket managed to generate figures way above that.

The European Space Agency used the same software they’d previously used in Ariane 4 rockets. They had problems with the Ariane 5 because it was faster than the Ariane 4. Faster means larger figures. The software could not handle the large readings, causing the rocket to go rogue. Ground control ordered it to self-destruct.^[6]

4 Bank Of America’s Dividend Payments And Stock Buybacks

The Federal Reserve regularly makes banks undergo stress tests. A stress test is the analysis of the financial condition of a bank under a stimulated negative economic situation. Stress tests are necessary to determine if a bank is healthy enough to overcome a terrible recession or financial crisis.

In 2014, Bank of America revealed that it had passed a Federal Reserve stress test for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis. The bank added that it was going to pay dividends to its shareholders and buy back $4 billion worth of stock. The bank later retracted the statement and revealed that it had made some mistakes.

Bank of America had not passed the stress test. It only thought it did because it had made a mistake in determining the values of some bonds owned by its subsidiary, Merrill Lynch. Shareholders weren’t happy, and the stock of the bank fell by $9 billion (five percent of its total value) the same day the error was revealed.^[7]

3 The Laufenberg Bridge Problem

A while back, Germany and Switzerland agreed to build a bridge over the Rhine between their cities on either side, both named Laufenburg. As per the agreement, each country would start construction from their side of the river and meet in the middle. The bridge was nearing completion in 2003, when both nations realized that one half of the bridge was 54 centimeters (21 in) higher than the other.

The error came up because of how each country defined the term “sea level.” Most countries have different methods of determining the sea level, considering that it’s not the same everywhere. Germany uses the North Sea to define its sea level, while Switzerland prefers the Mediterranean sea.

There was a difference of 27 centimeters between the countries’ respective sea levels. Germany and Switzerland knew this and had factored it into their calculations. However, someone did so in such a way that the disparity was doubled, causing one side of the bridge to rise by 54 centimeters more than it should have.^[8]

2 France’s Oversized Train Problem

In 2014, Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer francai (SNCF), France’s state railway operator, discovered its new high-speed trains were too wide for 1,300 stations across the country. The problem was that it had ordered 1,860 of the trains from Alstom of France and Bombardier of Canada. SNCF determined that it needed to reduce the width of the trains so that the stations could accommodate them. The error cost millions of euros.

The incident generated some displeasure in France; the transport minister referred to it as “comically tragic.” Canard Enchaine, a weekly satirical paper, made a cartoon in which commuters on a platform were told to “pull in their stomachs” as one of the new trains approached the station.

The mistake happened because French train stations vary in size. SNCF knew this and had requested the Reseau ferre de France (RFF), which was in charge of the tracks, to measure the space around the tracks. SNCF and RFF ended up with some problems after it was realized that RFF had skipped 1,300 older stations in its initial calculations. These stations were narrower than others. It was too late, as some trains had been delivered, and more were under construction.^[9]

1 The Amsterdam City Council’s €188 Million Housing Benefits Error

In December 2013, the finance office of the Amsterdam city council sent out €188 million to over 10,000 poor families living in the city. The city later discovered that it had made an error in the payments. It originally planned to send €1.8 million and not €188 million.

The payment software was programmed in cents and not euros. People received €15,500 instead of €155 and, in one case, €34,000 instead of €340.

Luckily, the city had been able to recover all of the money except for €2.4 million at the time the error was revealed in the news. It was expected that the city would have a hard time recovering €1.2 million of that. That is a substantial amount, along with the €300,000 the city had already spent on rectifying the calamity.^[10]

When it comes to mysteries of science, even the experts can be stymied sometimes. And then, with a little contemplation and testing, a simple solution can present itself. And every so often, the solution is so simple it makes the whole problem look a little goofy. 

10. Europe’s 300-Year Vanilla Problem

Vanilla comes from an orchid native to Mexico where the plants are pollinated by wild bees. Today the price of vanilla can get up to $600 per kilogram. The reason is that it’s hard as heck to harvest vanilla. 

To start with, of all the hundreds of orchid species, just one grows vanilla. And if you don’t have the bees to pollinate it, then you have a very uphill battle ahead of you. Even today, pollinating vanilla by hand needs to be done by experts who have been in the industry for years. The flowers bloom for only a single day. Then the process of growing, drying and processing the vanilla takes about a year. And that’s today. So what happened hundreds of years ago?

Europeans brought vanilla back to the continent in the 1500s, where it promptly did nothing. It literally took over 300 years before a Belgian horticulturist tried to look at things scientifically to determine why the vanilla in Europe wasn’t paying off. He was the one that determined Mexico’s Melipona bee was the natural pollinator of the plant and that nothing in Europe was doing the job. So what they were missing was bees. Just bees. 

It wouldn’t be until 1841 that a slave named Edmond Albius on an island in the Indian Ocean would figure out a method of hand pollination. Had it not been for a little horticultural science, who knows how long it would have been before anyone figured out a way to farm vanilla.   

9. The Parkes Radio Telescope Mystery Signals

In New South Wales, Australia, you’ll find the Parkes Observatory, home to a very large radio telescope that famously relayed signals from the 1969 moon landing. Less well known was the mystery that astronomers on site had been dealing with for 17 long years. You see, every so often, the telescope would receive mysterious signals. But no one could figure out what was causing them.

The telescope was detecting something called perytons. These are incredible short burst radio signals of a terrestrial origin. They also share a name with a mythical beast in a nod to how mysterious they were. The physicists on site thought they might be caused by lightning strikes somewhere near the telescope. But that was not the case.

As it happens, some of the scientists on site would put in full work days and that meant they’d need to have a meal now and then. So they’d use the microwave to heat it up. The signals being received were coming in at 2.4GHz, the same frequency as a microwave. 

Someone put two and two together and discovered that, if you pull the microwave door open before the cooking cycle completes, for a second it will release those perytons. So for 17 years, they were haunted by people reheating their lunch. 

8. NASA’s Multi-Million Dollar Mars Probe

Did you ever get frustrated in a math class at school and wonder when you were ever going to need to know something like trigonometry or integers in real life? Maybe you never did need to know any of that, but some people do, in particular the kind of people who work at NASA calculating thrust on satellites.

In 1999, NASA was hoping the Mars Climate Orbiter would be able to provide useful scientific data about weather patterns on Mars. Instead, it was destroyed shortly after entering the atmosphere.

NASA launched an internal investigation to figure out what happened. A $125 million piece of hardware never even got to see service at all, so after all that money and months of preparation, something big had to have gone wrong. The truth, however, was something small. A simple mathematical conversion. Someone had forgotten to translate the math, controlling the thrusters of the orbiter. The software calculated the force of the thrusters in pounds of force. But some of the other software being used calculated it in newtons. 

Along the way, scientists realized something was wonky because they had to keep making adjustments. But by the time it arrived, it was too late. It hit the atmosphere at the wrong angle and quickly burned up on entry. Had someone double checked that the metric conversions, it all could have been avoided. 

7. The Folded Structure of an AIDS-Related Enzyme

For some of us, it can be hard on the ego when we’re very knowledgeable on a subject and are having difficulty figuring a related problem out, only to have a random person with no special insight stumble on the solution as if by magic. That’s sort of what happened when AIDS researchers got stuck trying to identify the structure of an AIDS-related enzyme.

For years, they’d been working at figuring out the structure with no luck. So they opted for a novel solution: let someone else figure it out. In this case, they used a puzzle game called Foldit. The game allows users to play with the structures of proteins and enzymes to find the most optimal ways they can be folded. 

Researchers had been trying to crack this particular enzyme for 13 years. Once they placed it in the game to let the gamer community try it out, users found the solution in just three weeks. The end result was not a cure for AIDS, by any means, but it was an important step towards understanding and treating conditions like AIDS. 

6. Why Flamingoes Stand on One Foot

Picture a flamingo in your head. Is it standing on one foot? That’s the common image we have of these exotic pink birds, perched on one long, thin leg. And for a long while, no one knew exactly why a flamingo chose to stand like that. It wasn’t until 2019 that science gave us an answer: it’s literally easier than standing on two legs. 

Flamingoes cannot balance or rest as easily on two legs, it throws their balance right off. Their bodies are designed to handle that single leg much better. Experiments with dead flamingoes further proved that it’s much harder to balance one on two legs, but on one leg they stand up surprisingly easily. 

5. The Mystery of the Bermuda Triangle 

According to Karl Kruszelnicki, the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle is that we ever thought it was a mystery at all. The region is known for bad weather and that, combined with human error plus heavy traffic increasing the chance for more accidents, explains everything. No curses, no aliens, no mystery phenomena at all. 

Based on his research, he points out that, on a percentage basis, ships don’t go missing there any more than they do anywhere else in the ocean. It’s just that the high traffic numbers make it seem worse. 

The name “Bermuda Triangle” was even in common usage until 1964 and if there is any mystery, it’s mostly just related to how many ships may have gone missing in that area, since true numbers are hard to come by. 

4. Why Wombats Have Square Poop 

We’re taking a deep dive into science for this one and looking into one of the greatest mysteries of modern biology and zoology. Namely, why does the humble wombat produce poop in cubes when no other animal on earth is able to do so?

In weirdly practical terms, wombats poop strategically to communicate messages to other wombats. What kind of messages? Probably about territory, so other wombats know where they are. And the reason it’s in a cube is, potentially, to prevent it from rolling away. And while that is a great answer for why the wombat has poop cubes, it does nothing to answer how. Because if you wanted to poop a cube to mark your own territory, it’s not like you could just will it to be so. So what’s going on in a wombat’s butt?

Things get a little grisly here and involve wombat dissection. A wombat that had died in an accident was examined and scientists discovered that the intestines of the animal features a pair of grooves that are more elastic than the rest of the intestine. A 2D rendering was made, showing that the intestines have varied layers of thickness and stiffness. As muscles contract over several days to pull out all possible moisture and nutrients from the food being digested, the intestines form those odd like cubes and shoot them out the backdoor when it’s done. 

3. The Mysterious Antarctic Bio-Duck Sound

For 50 years, researchers in the Antarctic have made note of a strange sound that is, for all intents and purposes, like the quack of a duck. But it’s underwater. It was first recorded by submarine crews and because it was repeated so often, the original thinking was that it had to be a man-made sound. Later, someone suggested fish, but the sound was too loud for any known fish.

As luck would have it, someone studying minke whales had affixed a pair of them with trackers that also had microphones. When researchers listened to what they recorded, they had front row seats to the mysterious duck sound. Combined with years’ worth of previous recordings, they were able to conclusively determine that it had just been minke whales the whole time. Of course, none of that explained why the whales do it, but at least we know it’s them. 

2. How to Break Dry Spaghetti into Just Two Pieces

Let’s say you’re in the mood for some spaghetti, but you only have one rather small pot in which to cook it. The whole noodles are much too long to fit, so you’re going to have to break the spaghetti in two. But can you break spaghetti in two? As in perfectly in two with no extra broken pieces flying around? If you have ever broken a handful of spaghetti in half before, you already know the answer. Of course not. When you break spaghetti, it shatters like your dreams of not having to pick up tiny, broken pasta pieces from the stovetop. 

Busted spaghetti was the fate of every spaghetti chef in the world until MIT scientists got involved. It turns out there is a scientific way to break spaghetti into just two pieces; no broken bits. 

Elongated, brittle objects almost always break into multiple pieces, pasta or otherwise. This happens when you apply pressure from either end, causing a bend in the center. This bend eventually breaks, which causes a snap-back reaction that vibrates the pasta and breaks off more pieces. 

Researchers were able to determine that if the spaghetti is twisted to 270 degrees and then carefully bent at 3 millimeters per second, it will snap perfectly in two. 

1. Why You Keep Losing Socks

How many socks would you say you’ve lost in your lifetime? This has been a recurring issue for many of us. Socks go to the laundry but never make it back to the drawer. The result is a handful of stray, unmatched socks that we have at the bottom of the drawer. And it’s a goofy problem that people laugh about because it’s not really a big deal. But why does it happen? Someone has tried to solve the mystery, and it’s far less mysterious than the internet might make it out to be. 

Samsung commissioned a statistician and a psychologist to figure this sock mystery out and it seems like the average person loses 15 socks per year, which seems oddly high, but who are we to argue with Samsung science? 

The two experts put their heads together and came up with a slew of reasons for the mystery sock migration that so many of us endure. Turns out, you lost them.

Sounds pretty simple, right? They may have fallen under the washer, or maybe behind a radiator. They got put in the wrong wash load; they fell off a clothesline.

Mathematician Rob Eastaway blamed Murphy’s Law and pointed out that, statistically, you just can’t have X number of socks and expect not to lose one at some point. In essence, the science boils down to the unavoidable nature of the universe itself. You lose socks because you can’t not lose socks.

We tend to believe that powerful, world-changing innovations require complex engineering and a lot of scientific effort to come up with, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes, simple improvements like ball bearings and barbed wires have had a huge impact on the course of human history, often directly leading to the more complex works of engineering we see around us today. 

10. Barbed Wire

The modern barbed wire could be traced back to an American businessman and inventor, Joseph Glidden. His double-stranded design, patented in 1874, revolutionized the way fences and other enclosures were built around the world – especially in America – allowing for much larger areas of enclosure than ever before. Before the invention, farmers and ranchers had to use wooden fences or stone walls to enclose their land, which was either ineffective or immensely time-consuming and costly.

Barbed wire had a profound effect on the colonization of America, especially in ‘taming the Wild West’. It allowed for the division of vast amounts of land into smaller, more manageable units, enabling settlers to better protect their crops and livestock. It helped spur the expansion of the western frontier by making it easier for settlers to establish homesteads and ranches in remote areas, leading to economic and territorial expansion. It was now much easier to define and enforce property and enclosure laws, as the state was largely unable to do that in the more far-flung regions of the frontier. 

9. Flares

While flares have been used for navigation and other purposes for a long time, the modern signal flare was first produced by a businesswoman and inventor named Martha Coston. Patented in 1859, the prototype was based on designs left behind by her deceased husband. Coston flares were made of colored paper tubes filled with chemicals that produced bright, colorful flares when lit, massively improving upon its predecessors in both longevity and brightness.

This invention would go on to play a significant role in the American Civil War, as it was quite useful for communication between ships, signaling enemy positions, and in better coordinating battle strategies over large distances, especially during night battles. Even during the World Wars, flare guns would prove to be important tools for all sides, providing a simple-yet-effective way of sending messages to allied units. Today, signal flares continue to be crucial for emergency responders and search-and-rescue efforts.

8. Ball Bearing

Ball bearings are a type of bearing that use small, spherical balls to reduce friction between rotating parts. The concept dates back to at least Ancient Egypt, though it wasn’t until the invention of the Bessemer process and the bicycle in the mid-19th century that they could be mass-produced and used in a wide range of applications. Where the Bessemer process made it possible to manufacture high-quality steel more cheaply and efficiently, the bicycle provided the technology with its first popular, mass-produced application in the real world. 

The invention allowed engineers to significantly reduce friction and wear in rotating parts, which massively increased the reliability and durability of Industrial-era machines. Ball bearings also allowed for the creation of smaller, more compact machines, as they took up less space and weighed less than traditional bearings. Now, it’s impossible to make a working wheel that stays on its axle without almost-perfectly-spherical bearings, as they’re used in a wide range of devices ranging from simple household appliances to heavy military-grade machinery. 

7. Penicillin

On September 28, 1928, a Scottish microbiologist named Alexander Fleming made one of the most important discoveries in medical history. While experimenting with the Influenza virus, he noticed that a kind of mold had contaminated one of his petri dishes, preventing the growth of a bacteria he was studying. Even if completely unintentionally, Fleming had stumbled upon a fungus called Penicillium. 

From that, he synthesized the antibiotic drug we now know as Penicillin, which has since had a huge impact on modern life, especially in times of war. From the Second World War to the recent war in Iraq, Penicillin has saved countless lives by treating injuries that would have otherwise been fatal. Before Penicillin, bacterial infections like pneumonia were often fatal and difficult to treat. Now, it’s easily the most widely-used antibiotic drug in the world, reducing mortality rates and improving the quality of lives for millions of people around the world. 

6. Throwing Things

In the course of human evolution, throwing things like a projectile shows up some time around two million years ago. This ability gave early humans a distinct advantage in survival, allowing them access to new, larger food sources. The first throwing projectiles were likely stones, which were easily accessible and could be picked up and thrown with precision. It was only a matter of time before the throwing spear was invented and perfected, beginning an entirely new stage in human evolution and development. 

The evolution of the throwing spear directly led to a number of important changes in the human body, particularly in the size and shape of the human shoulder, which became more streamlined and allowed for greater speed and accuracy when throwing. It had other important social and cultural implications, too, as the rise of early hunting as a cooperative activity gave early humans a sense of security and control over their environment, allowing for further expansion and conquest. 

5. Transistor

Transistors were created in 1947 by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. It was the first major step in the miniaturization of electronics, as transistors replaced bulky vacuum tubes with a smaller, more-efficient, and reliable device.

It revolutionized the world of electronics, eventually paving the way for the development of the modern computer and semiconductor industry. Transistors allowed engineers to design devices that could perform the same function as much larger machines, making it possible to create smaller, faster, and far-more-powerful electronic gadgets. Today, improved and modern forms of transistors – like integrated circuits and microprocessors – play an elemental role in most of our everyday appliances.

4. Repeating Rifle

Before the invention of repeating rifles, firearms were limited in their rate of fire and required a reload after each shot, vastly limiting their overall effectiveness in warfare. It changed with early repeater prototypes, allowing soldiers to fire multiple shots in rapid succession. The first repeating rifles were invented in the mid-19th century, with the famous Henry rifle being the first working model to make a difference on the battlefield. 

Repeaters fundamentally changed early modern warfare, as firearms emerged as the deadliest weapon that could be wielded by a single combatant. One could now engage multiple enemies from a far greater distance than ever before, which had a major impact on the tactics and strategy of the time. The increased firepower also meant that battles could be won more quickly, reducing the number of casualties and duration of battles. 

3. Lever

At its most basic, the lever is a simple machine with a straight beam or rod that rotates around a fixed point called a fulcrum. It allows force to be multiplied in many ways, making it possible to lift really heavy objects with considerably less effort. While we don’t know exactly when it was invented, the lever was first mathematically described by Archimedes. He was apparently so impressed by it that he said, “Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world,” though that was perhaps stretching it a bit. 

Regardless, it’s difficult to overstate the importance of the humble lever, especially in the construction of early civilizations like Egypt and Greece. It allowed us to build bigger and more complex structures, such as the pyramids and aqueducts, as it was suddenly possible to move heavy stones and other building materials with ease. Today, advanced types of levers are used in almost every facet of our lives, from simple household tools like can openers and pliers to complex machines like cranes and earthmovers. 

2. Sailing

We’ve been using sails as a means of propulsion for thousands of years, even if it’s difficult to determine exactly who invented them first. For the first time, sails allowed ships to harness the power of the wind, allowing travel over much-longer distances than was possible with oars alone. 

While it wasn’t a complicated machine, this simple improvement revolutionized maritime navigation, making trade and commerce with faraway settlements possible. The use of sails also allowed ships to travel against the wind, opening up entirely new lands for trade or conquest. With the help of sailing, early civilizations were able to explore new lands, establish trade routes, and communicate with new cultures they had never known before, which in turn led to the development of more sophisticated economies and cultures around the world.

1. Paper Money

While paper money had been used in many parts of the world before, it was only in Europe during the time of the Crusades that the system really came into its own. European armies and merchants needed a way to carry large sums of money without being burdened by the weight of metal coins, giving birth to the first forms of modern paper currency called bills of exchange. 

The practice soon spread throughout Europe and across the Atlantic, as the introduction of paper money also played an important role in the colonization of the Americas. At the time, shipments between Europe and North America took a long time, resulting in continued cash deficits for settlers and merchants. Paper money allowed them to access the capital they needed to finance projects without having to transport large quantities of precious metal coins across the Atlantic. It also made it easier for European merchants to trade with native populations and other European colonies in the Americas, as it was far simpler to transport and less likely to be lost or stolen than previous forms of currency.