You never know which little role is going to lead to the first big one.

Here are the defining moments that helped 11 stars of classic TV shows to land their first major breaks.

Mary Tyler Moore was remembered by a casting director as "the attractive girl with the button nose...and three names."

Mary Tyler Moore had fired the imagination of many TV-viewing young men in the late 1950s when she had a small recurring role on Richard Diamond, Private Detective. Only her sultry voice was usually heard, although there was occasionally a shot of her lengthy dancer’s legs or a profile of her lips as she spoke.

Moore auditioned for the role of Danny Thomas’s daughter on Make Room for Daddy, and while Thomas was impressed with her acting, he ultimately turned her down because “no one would believe that someone with that cute button nose could be related to him.” However, when his production company was casting The Dick Van Dyke Show and an actress was needed to play Laura, Thomas remembered the attractive girl with the button nose and ordered his assistant “get me that girl with the three names.”

Lucille Ball got her start in comedy when she starred in a radio show called "My Favorite Husband (1948)."

Lucille Ball had been appearing in minor roles in a string of B-movies since the 1930s, often as a blonde chorus girl. It wasn’t until 1948 when she landed the role of housewife Liz Cooper on the radio show My Favorite Husband that she’d found her niche—comedy.

After 124 episodes on radio, CBS decided to bring My Favorite Husband to television. The only problem was they wanted Richard Denning, Lucille’s radio husband, to continue the role on TV, whereas Lucille refused to have anyone but her real-life husband Desi Arnaz play the part. CBS eventually hired two other actors to play Liz and George Cooper, but the network still thought that Ball had solid TV potential with her brand of physical comedy, so they eventually relented and gave the green light to a Desilu-produced series called I Love Lucy.

Dick Van Dyke got poached from his Broadway role in "Bye, Bye, Birdie" to star in the sitcom "Head of the Family."

When Carl Reiner submitted the pilot of his proposed sitcom Head of the Family, executive producer Sheldon Leonard liked everything about it except one small detail—Reiner himself. Leonard felt that Reiner was more of a “gag man”—a comic who was just reeling off a series of jokes—than an actor that could carry a sitcom. He also felt that Reiner was too ethnic (read: Jewish) to play white bread, affable Rob Petrie.

Someone had mentioned this guy Dick Van Dyke who could apparently act, sing, and dance and was appropriately middle-American-looking. Leonard went to Broadway where Van Dyke was performing in Bye, Bye, Birdie and decided he’d found their new Rob Petrie.

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Some companies find their niche and stick to it.

Others, though, have to adapt to changing markets in order to thrive. Here’s a look at some companies that switched industries at some point in their histories, usually for the better.

Avon

David H. McConnell started Avon in 1886 without really meaning to. McConnell sold books door-to-door, but to lure in female customers he offered little gifts of perfume. Before long, the perfume McConnell was giving away had become more popular than the books he was selling, so he shifted focus and founded the California Perfume Company, which later became Avon.

Nokia

The telecom giant got its start in Finland in 1865, when Fredrik Idestam opened a pulp mill and started making paper on the banks of Tammerkoski. The company later bounced around a number of industries before getting serious about phones in the 1960s.

CHECK OUT: 10 Uninhabited Islands And Why No One Lives On Them >

3M

When the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company’s founders opened their business in Two Harbors, Minnesota, in 1902, they weren’t selling Post-It Notes. The partners originally planned to sell the mineral corundum, an important ingredient in building grinding wheels, directly to manufacturers.

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If you ever find yourself in a Brewster’s Millions situation and have to burn through a fortune in a hurry, then all you need are this article, a few plane tickets and an empty stomach.

(It never hurts to plan for the unexpected.)

So just in case, here are 14 meals that can help you wipe out your bank account in no time.

Le Burger Extravagant

Where You Can Find It: Serendipity 3, New York

Price: $295

What Makes It So Expensive: Le Burger Extravagant is made with white truffle butter-infused Japanese Wagyu beef, topped with James Montgomery cheddar cheese, black truffles and a fried quail egg. It’s served on a gold-dusted roll spread with white truffle butter and topped with a blini, crème fraiche and caviar. If that weren’t enough to excuse the price, it also comes with a solid-gold, diamond-encrusted toothpick.

$666 Douche Burger

Where You Can Find It: 666 Burger

Price: $666

What Makes It So Expensive: While they may not be recognized by Guinness, New York food truck 666 Burger offers the $666 Douche Burger that features a Kobe beef patty stuffed with foie gras and gold-leaf, covered in caviar, lobster, truffles, Gruyere cheese melted with champagne steam and BBQ sauce made with Kopi Luwak coffee. While the burger was a satire of La Burger Extravagant, it is actually available for sale, but as of yet, only one person has actually ordered it.

FleurBurger 5000

Where You Can Find It: Fleur

Price: $5,000

What Makes It So Expensive: There’s also the FleurBurger 5000, from Vegas restaurant Fleur that features a Wagyu beef and foie gras patty with truffle sauce and shaved black truffles. Your order for this $5,000 burger also includes a bottle of $2,500 wine, Chateau Petrus, so really, you’re not just paying for the burger — but still, the $2,500 burger might be the world’s most expensive, even if it’s not official yet.

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How many movies or TV shows have you seen where a young sylph in a filmy nightgown runs through a forest in high heels to escape a bad guy?

She always trips and falls down.

If this makes you groan and mutter “only in the movies…”, then we think you’ll enjoy this scientific-type debunking of 11 common film and television tropes and clichés.

The Chloroform Nap

A common scene in many mystery movies is the old “knock out an unsuspecting victim by holding a rag full of chloroform over their face” trick. Would this tactic work in real life? Probably not. First of all, chloroform begins to lose its effectiveness as soon as it mixes with oxygen (and some of those villains spend a long time lurking in the shadows with their rags poised).

Secondly, chloroform doesn’t instantly knock a person unconscious; depending upon the victim’s size and weight, the chemical could take up to 10 minutes to subdue someone.

Falling Through Glass

No action film is complete without at least one person falling through a plate glass window and then walking away without a scratch. Injury-free defenestration is some definite Hollywood trickery that requires a “don’t try it at home!” warning. Broken glass has razor-sharp edges that can cut right through clothing and human flesh like a hot knife through refrigerated margarine.

Even if a person survived the fall, he’d typically sustain so many cuts that it would look like he’d just taken a ketchup bath.

Exploding Cars

Whether it’s on TV or the big screen, it seems like every high-speed car chase ends with at least one auto crashing and exploding into flames. Sometimes the vehicle drives over a cliff and spontaneously combusts into flames without any provocation.

Gasoline actually has a very narrow flammable range, and the mixture of gas vapor to outside air must be very specific (between 1.4 and 7.6%) before anything close to an explosion will occur. Gas may cause a car to burn after a bad wreck, but it very rarely detonates.

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For some of these big-name personalities, spying taught them the skills that made them famous; for others, being famous made them the perfect spies.

Roald Dahl

Long before he wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach, Roald Dahl was a fighter pilot for the British Royal Air Force during World War II. But after sustaining several injuries in a horrific crash in 1940—including a fractured skull and temporary blindness—Dahl was rendered unable to fly. In 1942, he was transferred to a desk job at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. Dahl quickly charmed his way into high society and became so popular among D.C. ladies that British intelligence came up with a whole new role for him: seducing powerful women and using them to promote Britain’s interests in America.

It wasn’t all fun and games, though. Clare Booth Luce, a prominent U.S. Representative and isolationist who was married to Time magazine founder Henry Luce, was so frisky in the bedroom that Dahl begged to be let off the assignment. In the end, however, his work with the ladies paid off. Dahl managed to not only rally support for Britain at a time when many prominent Americans didn’t want the country to enter the war, but he also managed to pass valuable stolen documents to the British government. Dahl’s stint in D.C. also helped him realize his talent for writing; it was a skill he discovered while penning propaganda for American newspapers.

Ian Fleming

By trade, author Ian Fleming was a journalist with a sharp memory and a keen eye for detail. In fact, he created James Bond, his famed international man of mystery, by plundering his own experiences as a spy.

During World War II, Fleming put his writing talents to use as part of British Naval Intelligence. Although he looked the part of Bond—tall, blue-eyed, and dapper—Fleming worked a desk job. He managed communications between the British Admiralty and the branch of intelligence tasked with sabotage behind enemy lines. Fleming was good at what he did. Not surprisingly, he proved particularly adept at conceiving outlandish spy schemes familiar to Bond fans.

Fleming’s work eventually extended to the United States. He was responsible for helping to create an American organization focused on international intelligence gathering. In 1941, he drew up a detailed chart for the chief of the OSS, showing how the new organization should be run. For his efforts, he was awarded an engraved .38 Colt Police Positive revolver.

Despite being a desk jockey, Fleming did get to witness one active operation—a break-in at the Japanese Consul General’s office at Rockefeller Center. As Fleming watched, British operatives sneaked into the office, cracked a safe, and made copies of the Japanese codebooks. Fleming later used the incident for Bond’s assignment in his first 007 book, Casino Royale.

Lucky Luciano

As head of the Genovese crime family, Charles “Lucky” Luciano did more for organized crime than any other mobster of his generation. Luciano smoothed out the Mafia’s rough edges and turned families of thugs into well-oiled, organized-crime machines. Not only that, but Lucky also embodied the gangster image—palling around with Frank Sinatra and giving girls $100 bills just for smiling. With a track record like that, it’s no wonder he ended up working for U.S. intelligence.

The story goes like this: In 1936, Luciano was convicted on 62 counts of “compulsory prostitution” and sentenced to 30 to 50 years in prison. But while he was incarcerated, the government discovered that it needed his help. In 1942, a French ocean liner, the Normandie, was being converted into a troop transport ship when it suddenly caught fire and sank. American officials suspected sabotage. But the dockworkers, who were under the Mafia’s thumb, refused to spill any information. The government needed an in, and Luciano was the key.

In many ways, Luciano felt an intense loyalty to America; after all, it’s where he’d earned his fortune. So, he used his influence to urge the dockworkers to cooperate with authorities. In exchange, the mobster enjoyed unsupervised visits from friends and associates for the rest of his time in prison. It was a sweet deal for the U.S. government, too; in a matter of weeks, eight German spies were caught and arrested for the destruction of the Normandie.

Luciano continued to help American forces for the remainder of World War II, using his contacts on the docks to feed information to the Office of Naval Intelligence. Later, as the Allies were planning their invasion of Italy, Luciano, who also had strong ties to the Sicilian mob, offered invaluable information on where to counterattack.

As a reward for his help, Luciano was released in 1946 after serving only 10 years in prison. However, the terms of his release required that he be deported to his birthplace of Italy and never allowed back into the United States. Luciano died in exile in 1962. Before he passed away, he told two biographers that he’d had his own men set fire to the Normandie as part of a creative plot to pressure the government to release him. But as The New York Times noted, Luciano was “known to exaggerate his own cleverness.”

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The future is arriving at the speed of …time. Back in the 1970s, Lee Majors received bionic implants that made him The Six Million Dollar Man. But that was fiction.

In the 1980s, we were introduced to a cyborg with living flesh grown over it called The Terminator. That was also fiction.

All that time, roboticists and medical researchers were working on real machines to take over the functions of human organs, such as respirators, mechanical hearts, and dialysis machines that we are familiar with.

But what about other body parts? Here are some that can change someone’s life, or maybe just give us a laugh.

Robot Hand

In the world of videoconferencing, it’s difficult to get close to people. Businessmen often size each other up by shaking hands, a custom that goes back to antiquity. Roboticists from Osaka University have a way to fill in that gap in global meetings.

The Robot Hand is made of silicon and sponge, can be heated to body temperature, and is embedded with pressure sensors. The hand that controls it remotely transmits the grip and amount of pressure to the person he’s shaking hands with.

Robot Lips

Long distance romances suffer the same lack of tactile sensation. Up to the plate steps Kissenger, a robotic device that connects with a faraway lover via Skype. That is, if your lover has another Kissenger. The sensors in the odd-looking device transmit your lip movements to your partner. And vice-versa. The company that makes Kissenger, Lovotics, also makes a couple of other devices to transmit your passion.

Robot Butt

At first glance, and you may blush, the robot butt seems like some kind of art project. But it appears to be an exercise in robotic research. A human-shaped pair of buttocks named Shiri responds to different kinds of touch with one of three reactions: tension, twitch, and protrusion. Sensors trigger the reaction of airbags implanted in the posterior.

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Sadly, the down economy has put a lot of workers over age 50 in the unenviable position of needing to find a new profession.

Don’t believe that old cliché about middle-aged dogs and new tricks, though; lots of wildly successful people found big success in careers they began after their fiftieth birthdays.

Here are just a few examples.

Edmond Hoyle

Whether or not you know it, you probably owe Hoyle a tip of the cap each time you reach for a deck of cards. The Englishman is considered to be the world’s first technical writer on the rules of card games, and he didn’t put pen to paper as a young card sharp.

Hoyle was around 70 years old when he first began recording the rules of various card games in 1741; over the last 27 years of his life, his smash hit A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist went through over a dozen editions.

Colonel Sanders

Harland Sanders was no slouch as a young man, but he didn’t become the string-tied chicken mogul we know and love until he was 65.

“The Colonel” had a relatively successful restaurant and motel on U.S. 25 in Corbin, KY, but when Interstate 75 opened seven miles from Sanders’ restaurant, his business begin to dwindle.

Rather than go broke, he began to work on perfecting his spice blend and quick-cooking technique for making fried chicken in 1952. He then began touring the country selling Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises, and by the time he sold the business for $2 million in 1964, there were over 900 of them.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie may be some of the world’s most beloved children’s books, but she was no spring chicken when she sat down to write them.

Wilder didn’t publish her first novel until she was 65 years old, and she still managed to crank out 12 books in her series, although some were published posthumously.

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The internet has embraced the story of Brendon Grimshaw over the past year.

Grimshaw did what so many dream of doing: he bought an island. He purchased Moyenne Island in the Indian Ocean in 1964 for $20,000, quit his job in 1973 to move there, and spent the past 40 years developing it into a paradise, cultivating and protecting flora and fauna native to the Seychelles.

Now 86, Grimshaw’s island is worth millions to developers, but he is determined that it remain a nature preserve after his death.

There are still many abandoned and uninhabited islands around the world. Why isn’t there anyone living on them? After all, 270 people live on Tristan de Cunha, which is 2430 kilometers from the next inhabited island!

The reasons islands remain uninhabited are financial, political, environmental, or religious—or a combination of those reasons.

Ōkunoshima Island

Three kilometers off the coast of Japan, Ōkunoshima Island is overrun with rabbits, which are not a native species.

But there are no human residents on Okunoshima Island. It was once the site of a chemical weapons plant, turning out poison gas for the Japanese Imperial Army from 1929 to 1945.

The Allied Occupation Forces dismantled the plant and let laboratory animals go free (hence the rabbits). Japan did not speak of Okunoshima for many years. Then in 1988, the Ōkunoshima Poison Gas Museum was opened on the site.

Tourists take the ferry to the island to interact with the friendly rabbits more than to see the museum.

Antipodes Islands

The Antipodes are a group of volcanic islands south of New Zealand.

The cold climate and harsh winds make the islands too harsh a place to live. It is known for numerous shipwrecks and deaths, some from trying to survive on the islands, despite supplies being left there in castaway huts, as seen in the photograph.

Two people died by shipwreck there as recently as 1999.

Jaco Island

Jaco Island in East Timor has no permanent inhabitants because locals consider it sacred land.

However, that does not mean they won’t accommodate tourists. Day trips as well as camping on the island is encouraged. Local fishermen double as vendors to the tourists. Since 2007, Jaco Island is part of Nino Konis Santana National Park.

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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 just keep trying until it worked.) But looking back, did blowing into the cartridge really help? I’ve talked to the experts, reviewed a study on this very topic, and have the answer. But first, let’s talk tech. 

The NES console marketed in the US looked very different from Nintendo’s original Famicom console sold in Japan. The Famicom (short for Family Computer) is shown above — it featured a top loading design in which you crammed the cartridge into a slot on the top. (It also featured a snazzy red-and-cream color scheme that to my eye looks a bit like Voltron.) By putting the cartridge in on top, the label on the Famicom cartridge served as a kind of billboard, advertising the game currently being played. When Nintendo created the NES for the US, a major design change was to place that cartridge slot deep inside a VCR-style gray box (shown below). It was similar technology, but hidden in a way that American consumers might assume was more like a familiar VCR — and more importantly, different from game consoles like the Atari 2600, which were old news. Nintendo wanted to be new, and better — so it hid its slot.

What Nintendo tried to emulate was a “Zero Insertion Force” (ZIF) connection — a phrase that sounds like a bad joke about problems in bed, but is a real engineering notion. A ZIF connection is one in which the user doesn’t directly press the cartridge into its host connector — no insertion force is exerted by the user. This is a good thing from an engineering standpoint because users can do things like push too hard, and eventually connectors that require this kind of contact wear out. A typical mid-to-late 80s VCR is a variant of ZIF design: the tape goes in the front, then the machine grabs it and gently pulls it into place. That’s a pretty durable design. That’s not what the NES had, though. Its slot required insertion force, and it was buried inside a box — making it hard to fix when things went wrong.

"Enough overzealous cleaning could ruin a connector, rendering the cartridge unplayable. I know this because I did it."

In the NES, the user opened a front flap, slid a cartridge into the machine, and the insertion force occurred at the back of the machine, where the (hidden) cartridge slot lived — pins within the cartridge crammed up against the slot in the back. Then the user pushed the cartridge down (again emulating the behavior of a VCR) and powered on the console. This little ritual felt very satisfying, but over time the cartridge slot got dirty, its springs wore out, and the cartridges themselves got dirty. All of these factors worked together to cause poor contact between cartridge and slot, which meant your game just didn’t work — the machine couldn’t communicate with the cartridge over a bad connection, and frustration ensued.

Metal Versus Oxygen: FIGHT!

Nintendo designed its NES connector using nickel pins bent into a position so that they’d give slightly when a cartridge was inserted, then spring back after it was removed. These pins became less springy after repeated use, which make it hard for them to firmly grasp the game cartridge’s connectors. To make things worse, the cartridges themselves had copper connectors. Copper tarnishes when exposed to air, causing it to develop a distinctive patina. While this patina was often not bad enough to cause problems, an overzealous kid (ahem, like me) might notice this effect and (ahem) attempt to remove it using all sorts of things from erasers to steel wool to solvents (side-note: my father, being a computer guy, had access to a magical substance called Cramolin — apparently worth its weight in gold, it could clean anything). Enough overzealous cleaning could ruin a connector, rendering the cartridge unplayable. I know this because I did it.

Blowing into the Cartridge

When things went wrong inside your NES, the problem was usually a bad connection between the cartridge and its slot. That could be due to tarnishing, corrosion, crud in various places, weak pins in the slot, or other issues. The symptoms of a bad connection could include the game not starting at all, the console showing a blinking light, or the game starting up with garbage all over the screen (below, a photo of Zelda II shows this form of startup glitch). To combat these problems, in the mid-1980s my friends and I somehow learned this secret: if we took out the cartridge, blew in it, and reinserted it, it worked. And if it didn’t work the first time, it eventually worked, on the second or fifth or tenth time. But looking back on it, I wondered: did that blowing actually help? And if it did…why? Was dust the culprit, and I was blowing it out of the cartridge? I spoke with several experts (who insisted they were not experts, despite their backgrounds) to find out.

Zelda II glitch image courtesy of Flickr user Kevin Simpson, used under Creative Commons license. See more glitch images at Flickr!

First up, Vince Clemente, producer of Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters — a documentary about players of the classic NES Tetris. Clemente said, “[Blowing in the cartridge] is actually terrible for the games and makes the contacts rust. You’re really not supposed to do it. But it works. [laughs]” This sums up the problem: although intellectually we knew that blowing into electronics was bad, we did it anyway. It seemed to work.

So I turned to another authority, Frankie Viturello, who hosts the gaming show Digital Press Webcast among many other gaming-related projects — he also worked in a game store for years. Viturello’s first response was: “While I admittedly may have dabbled in a little cartridge-blowing as a naive NES-playing youth, I’ve long-since been an advocate for not doing it with the stance that for whatever it may do to aid in the temporary functionality of an NES, it ultimately opens the door for damage and distress to the hardware.” So I went deeper — in the following mini-interview, I have added emphasis in various places.

Higgins: “How did this lore about blowing into the cartridges spread across the US?”

“[Blowing in the cartridge] is actually terrible for the games and makes the contacts rust. You’re really not supposed to do it. But it works. [laughs]”

 Viturello: “It was very much a hive-mind kind of thing, something that all kids did, and many still do on modern cartridge based systems. Prior to the NES I don’t recall people blowing into Atari or any other cartridge-based hardware that predated the NES (though that likely spoke to the general reliability of that hardware versus the dreaded front-loading Nintendo 72 Pin connectors). I suppose it has a lot to do with the placebo effect. US NES hardware required, on most games, optimal connection across up to 72 pins as well as communication with a security lock-out chip. The theory that ‘dust’ could be a legitimate inhibitor and that ‘blowing it out’ was the solution, still sounds silly to me when I say it out loud.“

Higgins: “Why would blowing into the cartridges have any effect? It feels like it works, sometimes.”

Viturello: “While there are some collectors/enthusiasts who will defend their position that the moisture in human breath will likely cause no damage to an NES cartridge, based on what I’ve personally seen over the past 20 years, I not only disagree with them, but feel strongly that the connection/correlation between blowing into an NES cartridge and the potential for long-term effects including wear, corrosion of the metal contacts, mold/mildew growth, is sound logic.

“So, WHY does blowing into a cartridge have any effect? I’m not a scientist and I don’t have any real empirical evidence, but I’m happy to speculate. The most reasonable explanations — in my opinion — are: 1.) The act of removing, blowing in, and re-seating a cartridge most likely creates another random opportunity for the connection to be better made. So removing the cartridge 10 times and putting back in without blowing on it might net the exact same results as blowing on it between each time. 

 And 2.) The moisture that occurs when you blow into a cartridge has some type of immediate effect on the electrical connection that occurs. Either the moisture helps to eliminate/move any debris/chemical buildup that has occurred when the contacts and the pin-readers rub together, or the moisture increases conductivity to a degree that it can send the data through any existing matter that was previously interfering with the connection. Those are my best theories.”

“Things like pressing down on the cartridge just helped with the connection because everything was horizontal in the pin-connector. Downward pressure pressed the cartridge pins more firmly against the connectors and eliminated some possibility for a missed or imperfect connection.”

Higgins: “What about other ways could you make a cartridge work when it was misbehaving? I’ve heard about stacking an extra cartridge on top of the one you’re playing, to force it down.”

Viturello: “Things like pressing down on the cartridge just helped with the connection because everything was horizontal in the pin-connector. Downward pressure pressed the cartridge pins more firmly against the connectors and eliminated some possibility for a missed or imperfect connection.”

Studying Cartridge-Blowing

Viturello actually conducted a nonscientific study on this very subject. He took two very similar copies of Gyromite, removed the plastic cartridge shell to expose the contacts (making them easier to photograph), and proceeded to blow on one of them ten times a day (all in one go, to simulate a zealous young gamer’s efforts), for a month. The second copy was a control — it didn’t get the blowing treatment. The blown and non-blown games were stored in the same location in his house, so in theory, this test should reveal the visual effects of repeated blowing on cartridges — though they don’t include functional results attempting to play the games. There is at least one issue with the methodology of the test: the cartridges weren’t exactly identical to start with (they look to me like slightly different revisions of the same circuit board), so it’s theoretically possible that the contacts were coated differently between revisions. Still, it’s the best evidence we have, and the results are super gross.

While I encourage you to read the study, I can summarize the results. Here’s a look at the cartridges at the beginning of the test:

And after a month:

So that’s pretty gross, right? It’s unclear what the result is — whether that’s copper patina, mold, or what — but it appears that some effect occurred. See also: this guy’s response to the study relating the story of an extreme case of N64 cartridge licking.

Nintendo Weighs In

In a brief note on its NES Game Pak Troubleshooting page, Nintendo states:

Do not blow into your Game Paks or systems. The moisture in your breath can corrode and contaminate the pin connectors.

So the Answer is No

So, dear readers, all signs point to no: blowing in the cartridge did not help. My money is on the blowing thing being a pure placebo, offering the user just another chance at getting a good connection. The problems with Nintendo’s connector system are well-documented, and most of them are mechanical — they just wore out faster than expected.

Having said that, it’s true that kids can be grubby, and getting crud into the cartridge or slot was a real problem — I suspect that most of that crud was not just dust, though, and required a more thorough cleaning than a moist mouth-blast could provide. In fact, Nintendo released an official NES Cleaning Kit in 1989 in an attempt to keep both the slot and cartridges clean. Ultimately, Nintendo redesigned the NES console, releasing an NES 2 console in 1993 that’s commonly known as the “top loader.” Its main feature? A top loading slot. It was more like the original Famicom, using a slot that held up better to abuse. Similarly, the SNES (Super Nintendo Entertainment System) was a top loader.

Fixing Your Old NES & Maintaining Your Games

If you have an NES with connector problems, it can probably be repaired, and you might even be able to do it yourself. Check out iFixit’s repair guides for some common fixes, including a relatively easy one — fixing the springs that hold up the cartridge slot. While mine never broke, I had a bunch of friends with dead springs. We can fix it!

And when I asked Viturello about cleaning cartridges, he told me:

Viturello: “The best methods for cleaning game cartridges are: isopropyl alcohol and swabs or, more recently I and others have discovered that non-conductive metal polish such as Sheila Shine or Brasso is very effective and also helps to protect against some of the elements that would otherwise cause that natural tarnish that occurs through regular exposure to the elements and standard usage.”

Share Your NES Memories

I know we have a variety of old-school gamers out there. Do you remember the tip to wiggle the cartridge side-to-side? What about whacking the cartridge with the palm of your hand before putting it in? I’m curious what tricks you guys got up to, trying to make your game systems work. Also, many thanks to Frankie Viturello for answering my questions — check out his webcast for gaming goodness. (Episode 5 is devoted to the NES.)

More from Mental_Floss: How 13 classic video games got their start >

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On Earth, we get snow, rain, fog, hail, and sleet, and all of them are basically the same thing: water.

For a true change of weather, you need to go to other worlds.

Here’s a tour of what to expect on a trip through our solar system.

Mars: Dry Ice Snow

Scientists have known for years that the polar caps of Mars are made of a combination of water ice and dry ice (or frozen carbon dioxide — the same stuff that makes fog when you dump it into a pot of water).

But how does it get there?

The ice caps grow and recede with the seasons (in the Hubble images above, the carbon dioxide is receding with the onset of spring), so either the carbon dioxide is freezing directly out of the atmosphere, or it’s snowing.

Scientists working with data from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recently solved the puzzle: MRO detected clouds of carbon dioxide crystals, and clear evidence of snow falling out of them. The snow would not fall as flakes, but as tiny cuboctohedrons (which have eight triangular faces and six square faces).

On the surface, Mars snow probably looks like granulated sugar.

Venus: Sulfuric Acid Rain

Once thought to be our sister planet, Venus is, in actuality, a hellhole.

The surface is over 462 degrees C (864 degrees F) — easily hot enough to melt lead — and the atmospheric pressure is about 92 times the pressure on Earth at sea level. It’s also bone dry (water is baked out of the soil).

But high up above the slowly rotating surface, where the winds whip violently, Venus is enshrouded by clouds of sulfuric acid (shown here in ultraviolet light from the Hubble Telescope). When it rains, the acid falls down to about 25 km before evaporating — at these temperatures, even sulfuric acid can’t stay liquid.

The vapor rises back up to recondense as clouds, giving Venus a liquid cycle confined entirely to the upper atmosphere.

Jupiter's Moon, Io: Sulfur Dioxide Snow

Venus isn’t the only hellhole in the solar system.

Jupiter’s moon Io would fit the bill pretty well, too. It’s riddled with active volcanoes, covered in brimstone, and hiding a subsurface ocean of lava. And it snows the sort of snow you might get when Hell freezes over, because it too is made of brimstone: sulfur, and, more specifically, sulfur dioxide, which were detected when the Galileo orbiter flew through the volcanic plumes on its kamikaze mission in September 2003.

Molten sulfur, heated to the boiling point below the surface of Io by torturous tidal flexing, sprays out of the volcanoes like a geyser would spray water on Earth. In the cold, airless void of space, the sulfur dioxide quickly crystalizes into tiny flakes; most of it falls back to the surface as a fluffy yellow snow.

Galileo’s sensors indicated that the particles were very small, perhaps 15-20 molecules apiece, so the snow would look extremely fine on the surface.  In the photo above, the broad white semi circle of material is sulfur dioxide snow from a plume called Amirani.

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Worried you might be tortured and interrogated soon, but don’t want to break down too quickly?

Well then, better grab a copy of Resident Evil, Doom, Gears of War, or whatever your favorite violent video game happens to be because, as it turns out, it might just help you hold out against pain longer.

Researchers from Keele University have discovered that violent games could potentially be used to help relieve pain.

And no, not all video games have this effect; sports games, for example, don’t increase your pain tolerance.

The study found that volunteers who played violent games could hold their hands in ice-cold water for 65% longer than those who played a non-violent golf game.

They speculate that this is because our minds respond to virtual violence the same way they respond to seeing real violence, thus increasing our heart rate and our pain tolerance as a result.

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OK, maybe some of you are familiar with some of these.

But how many of these questionable sequels have you actually seen?

From "Cruel Intentions" to "Legally Blondes" take a look at 16 straight-to-DVD movie sequels. 

Ace Ventura, Jr.

Josh Flitter played Ace Ventura, Jr. in this 2009 spin-off of the original series that starred Jim Carrey.

While Carrey isn’t in this film, he and Flitter do share one movie credit: both were in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie’s Island Adventure

According to an informal survey done here at the office, most people are aware this film exists, but nobody has actually seen it. Can anyone share a review?

American Psycho 2

Mila Kunis and William Shatner star in this straight-to-DVD sequel to the Christian Bale hit.

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Let’s say that the conspiracy theorists are right.

Let’s say some malevolent group — the government, powerful corporations, extraterrestrials — really is trying to read and/or control the thoughts of the Average Joe with radio waves.

Would the preferred headgear of the paranoid, a foil helmet, really keep The Man and alien overlords out of our brains?

The scientific reasoning behind the foil helmet is that it acts as a Faraday cage, an enclosure made up of a conducting material that shields its interior from external electrostatic charges and electromagnetic radiation by distributing them around its exterior and dissipating them. While sometimes these enclosures are actual cages, they come in many forms, and most of us have probably dealt with one type or another.

Elevators, the scan rooms that MRI machines sit in, “booster bags” that shoplifters sometimes use to circumvent electronic security tags, cables like USB or TV coaxial cables, and even the typical household microwave all provide shielding as Faraday cages.

While the underlying concept is good, the typical foil helmet fails in design and execution. An effective Faraday cage fully encloses whatever it’s shielding, but a helmet that doesn’t fully cover the head doesn’t fully protect it. If the helmet is designed or worn with a loose fit, radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation can still get up underneath the brim from below and reveal your innermost thoughts to the reptilian humanoids or the Bilderberg Group.

Opposite Effect

In 2005, a group of MIT students, prodded by “a desire to play with some expensive equipment,” tested the effectiveness of foil helmets at blocking various radio frequencies. Using two layers of Reynolds aluminum foil, they constructed three helmet designs, dubbed the Classical, the Fez, and the Centurion, and then looked at the strength of the transmissions between a radio-frequency signal generator and a receiver antenna placed on various parts of their subjects’ bare and helmet-covered heads.

The helmets shielded their wearers from radio waves over most of the tested spectrum (YouTube user Mrfixitrick likewise demonstrates the blocking power of his foil toque against his wireless modem) but, surprisingly, amplified certain frequencies: those in the 2.6 Ghz (allocated for mobile communications and broadcast satellites) and 1.2 Ghz (allocated for aeronautical radionavigation and space-to-Earth and space-to-space satellites) bands.

While the MIT guys’ tongue-in-cheek conclusion — "the current helmet craze is likely to have been propagated by the Government, possibly with the involvement of the FCC" — maybe goes a few steps too far, their study at least shows that foil helmets fail at, and even counteract, their intended purpose. That, or the students are aliens or government agents who fabricated these results in an effort to get you to take your perfectly functional helmet off…

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It's probably not shocking that singer/actress Jennifer Lopez loves "West Side Story," but we were surprised to learn that action star Vin Diesel's favorite flick is "Gone With The Wind."

See which classic (and corny) films these 23 stars say are their all-time favorites.

Our friends at Mental_Floss put together this list of politicians, musicians, and actors who revealed which films they love to watch over and over again, and what scenes or movie moments inspired them to rise to the top of their careers.

Barack Obama

The Movie: The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather: Part II (1974)

When Katie Couric asked then-presidential-candidate Barack Obama what his favorite movie is, he replied, “Oh, I think it would have to be The Godfather. One and Two. Three not so much. That saga—I love that movie. …I think my favorite has to be, the opening scene of the first Godfather… It sets the tone for the whole movie.”

Mitt Romney

The Movies: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)

Romney lists these two films as his favorites on his Facebook page, followed by Star Wars and Henry V.

Justin Bieber

The Movie: Step Brothers (2008)

In 2010, Bieber provided US Weekly with a list of “25 Things You Don’t Know About Me.” #17: “Step Brothers is my favorite movie.”

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As we’ve been seeing lately, everything politicians have done since birth ends up being in the news—especially during election time. Game show appearances are no exception, so check out these seven politico contestants. Some did surprisingly well; others should definitely stick to their day jobs.

1. Ronald Reagan on I've Got A Secret, 1961

A pre-politics Reagan gives Henry Morgan and Steve Allen a radio announcer’s test to see if he can make them laugh in the middle of the “audition.” If you’ve ever wanted to see the 40th President of the United States blow up a balloon using a trumpet, here’s your chance. The whole thing is quite charming.

2. Senator John McCain on Jeopardy!, 1965

If you think John McCain has gotten over his loss in Final Jeopardy almost 50 years ago, you’d be wrong. He still remembers the exact question: “Cathy loved him, but married Edgar Linton instead.” Brontë buffs, of course, know that the answer is Heathcliff. But McCain could only recall the name of the book and answered as such: “What is Wuthering Heights?”

3. Former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm on The Dating Game, 1978

When Jennifer Granholm was 19, she probably had no idea that she would someday have a career in politics, which is too bad—she might have asked the host to refer to her as something other than “cute and curvaceous.” Granholm is semi-apologetic about the wall o’ hair, though. “This is what being a teenager in the ’70s gets you,” she said. “I was having a bad hair decade.”

Spoiler alert: it didn’t work out with the bachelor she picked. Just for reference, here’s Jennifer at the Democratic National Convention this year.

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EPCOT opened 30 years ago today. Here’s a look at the proposed West Coast version from a story Stacy originally posted last year.

Michael Eisner’s original plans for the expansion of the Disney empire in Anaheim included a version of Orlando’s EPCOT called WestCOT.

Like EPCOT, WestCOT would have been made up of two parts – Future World, a place for guests to get hands on with science, and an area where guests could experience different cultures and architecture. Instead of being divided into individual countries, though, the mini-world tour would be split into regions: the New World (the Americas), the Old World (Europe), the World of Asia (guess) and the World of Africa (right again). Unlike EPCOT, guests would have been able to reside in any one of those regions during their stay, living right in the park. This hotel-within-the-park idea was eventually used at Tokyo DisneySea (anyone been there?). Rides included a James Bond-esque chase on a train, a trip through an Egyptian palace and a Native American Spirit Lodge.

Even more ambitious was a ride called “The Three Great Religions of the World.” Say what?! Luckily, Eisner and other Disney execs realized doing this without offending someone or creating some sort of controversy was more or less impossible, even for Imagineers who do the impossible every day. I’m guessing it’s totally out of the picture these days, but in 1994, Imagineer Tony Baxter still had hopes for it:

“We had settled on depicting the seven days of creation and avoiding all of the problems between the Muslim and the Jewish and Christian versions of that. And we were getting very excited because we were starting to deal with seven of the great artists of the world and trying to have them depict each of the single days that they had been given. Maybe that will happen later.”

Uh… maybe not.

Like all Disney parks, there were plans for WestCOT to have a large architectural symbol that would represent the park. At first, designers thought they would replicate the giant geodesic sphere from Florida, but make it gold and almost twice as big. When mockups were made, they quickly realized that it would totally distract from the view on Main Street over at Disneyland. The fact that nearby residents were already complaining about how a massive gilded golf ball would be an eyesore whenever they stepped outside probably influenced the decision as well. In the end, a 300-foot white spire was the winner.

And all of this was just the tip of the iceberg: there were incredibly detailed plans for landscaping, hotels, restaurants and more. It was projected that the additions would attract an extra 25 million visitors to the area every year. Nearly 30,000 jobs would be created.

So what went wrong? Well, Disney ran into a lot of problems along the way, including lack of funding from outside sources (hey, someone had to pay for revamped roads, highways and parking garages), push back from some pretty prominent people, and the financial failure of EuroDisney. So, even though WestCOT had officially been announced to the public in 1991, it was scrapped just a few years later.

Still, something had to be done, so execs put their heads together at a three-day summit in Colorado to come up with the next big amusement park. The result of the long weekend was California Adventure, which opened in 2001.

SEE ALSO: Why Disney is spending over $2 million on Republican candidates in Florida >

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By most accounts, Ted Bundy was handsome, charming, and intelligent.

He was also violent, manipulative, amoral — and exhibited many of the hallmarks of a psychopath.

Psychologists use an extensive list of traits to identify psychopaths, and now they have one more marker that might diagnose them: a recent study suggests that psychopaths possess a poor sense of smell.

Psychopathy is usually diagnosed using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist – Revisnoed, which analyzes at least 20 different aspects of someone’s personality and case history to determine if that person has the disorder. Psychopaths are typically callous, insincere, impulsive and pleasure-seeking.

Past research has found that those afflicted show lessened functioning in the orbitofrontal cortex in the front of the brain, an area that controls planning, controlling impulses, and following norms.

Smells Like Psychopathy

In addition to controlling those behaviors, the orbitofrontal cortex aids olfactory sensing — so Mehmet Mahmut and Richard Stevenson of Australia’s Macquarie University decided to test 79 non-criminal adult psychopaths’ senses of smell. First, the researchers measured levels of psychopathic behavior based on four traits: manipulation, callousness, erratic lifestyles, and criminal tendencies. They also looked at how much each participant could exhibit empathy. Then Mahmut and Stevenson tested each person’s olfactory abilities.

They found that those who showed the highest levels of psychopathic behavior failed to identify smells and could not discern the difference between two smells. The researchers believe that understanding that psychopaths have lessened smelling ability can provide scientists with another way to diagnose the disorder — which can be a challenge, because psychopaths are often excellent actors.

“Our findings provide support for the premise that deficits in the front part of the brain may be a characteristic of non-criminal psychopaths,” Mahmut and Stevenson write in the paper, which appears in the journal Chemosensory Perception.

“Olfactory measures represent a potentially interesting marker for psychopathic traits, because performance expectancies are unclear in odor tests and may therefore be less susceptible to attempts to fake good or bad responses.”

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In your dreams, you’re the star of your own movie—and your subconscious often has you performing stunts that would put Tom Cruise to shame.

But even if you’re swinging around the top of the Burj Khalifa in your dream, you stay put in real life. This is thanks to a little thing called sleep paralysis, which keeps you locked in place while you slumber so you don’t hurt yourself.

Until recently, scientists understood little about how sleep paralysis works; figuring it out could shed light on disorders such as narcolepsy and REM sleep disorder, and researchers at the University of Toronto might be close to understanding how the phenomenon occurs.

For healthy people, sleep paralysis occurs during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, and they are blissfully unaware that it’s even happening.

But for some narcoleptics, falling asleep or waking up makes sleep paralysis kick in, creating a terrifying state where the mind is awake, but the body cannot move. The paralysis can last several seconds or even minutes, with rare cases lasting for hours.

To get a better understanding of what causes sleep paralysis in REM, Patricia Brooks and John Peever at the University of Toronto monitored the electrical activity in rats’ facial muscles, triggered by trigeminal motor neurons sending messages to the brain (basically, they looked at what causes sleeping rats to chew while asleep).

In an effort to stop sleep paralysis, they blocked the neurotransmitters they thought were responsible for the phenomenon—ionotropic GABAA/glycine receptors—but sleep paralysis still occurred. Next, Peever and Brooks tried blocking the GABAA/glycine ionotropic receptors and the metabotropic GABAB—which did, in fact, stop sleep paralysis, meaning that both gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) and glycine must be present and working together to cause sleep paralysis.

“Understanding the precise mechanism behind these chemicals’ role in REM sleep disorder is particularly important because about 80 percent of people who have it eventually develop a neurodegenerative disease, such as Parkinson’s disease,” Peever says. “REM sleep behavior disorder could be an early marker of these diseases, and curing it may help prevent or even stop their development.”

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“You have a beautiful face… But your nose?” If you were alive in the early 20th century and you didn’t like your nose, the good news is that you didn’t have to resort to expensive and painful rhinoplasty.

The bad news is that your other option involved this painful-looking and unsightly Trados Nose-Shaper. Model 22 was pretty popular in 1918, if the number of ads is any indication, but “Face Specialist” M. Trilety didn’t stop there. By 1928, Trilety was a “Pioneering Noseshaping Specialist who offered quick, painless and permanent nose correction with Model 25.

Dimple Stamper

Isabella Gilbert must have spent a significant portion of her life distressed over her lack of dimples, because in 1936 she invented this spring-loaded contraption that promised to “make a fine set” by pressing a pair of knobs into the cheeks. This seems like a commitment you would have to take seriously, since real dimples don’t just show up for a night out on the town.

Giant Stationary Hairdryer

Short hair was all the rage in the Twenties, but even a bob needs a good blowout. The first portable handheld hairdryer was invented in 1920, but that didn’t stop some intrepid soul from building this massive industrial-strength version sometime soon after. Given that it stands on six legs and appears to be rather heavy, we can probably assume that this model didn’t grab much of the hairdryer market.

Dr. Lecter's Masks

Anyone with “facial defects” in 1912 was fortunate to have Lillian Bender, who invented this super-comfy device which promised “removal of wrinkles and sagging flesh” by way of a fully adjustable rubber mask. Bender thoughtfully included an opening for the mouth, which was probably helpful since the elastic collar was tied corset-style around the throat.

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Snake oil salesmen all over the web would have you believe that, for a few easy payments, they’ll reveal to you a diet focused on “negative calorie” foods.

You’ll be able to eat all you want and lose weight while doing it, because the amount of energy used to chew and digest these foods is supposedly greater than the amount of energy they provide.

But is that really true?

Some of the energy in every piece of food you eat is considered a wash because an equal amount of energy is expended to eat and digest it, but the thermic effect of food — or diet-induced thermogenesis, as it’s technically known — usually only accounts for around 10 percent of your caloric intake (there are some outliers, of course, and high-protein foods may lose as much as 30 percent of their energy to digestion, while certain easily-processed fats have a thermic effect of as little as 2 or 3 percent).

Celery is one of the most touted negative-calorie foods, because much of its caloric content is bound up in cellulose, a fiber that humans can’t digest.

The amount of energy we can extract from celery is negligible, a measly 6 calories in a medium-sized stalk. But even then, it only takes a little more than one half of a calorie’s worth of energy to digest what we can of that piece (and maybe even less: The thermic effect has been shown to be lower after high-fiber meals).

The bottom line is that any kind negative-calorie snacking, celery or otherwise, is purely wishful thinking. But celery stalks are still worth a chew: They’re obviously better for your caloric balance sheet than, say, a candy bar or a Slim Jim. Just don’t expect them to be green, fibrous magic bullets for your diet.

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